When I started programming around 2014, there was an incredible excitement stirring. React had just started catching on, and it was unlocking a huge amount of pent up creativity in the web development space. Web apps really started to become feasible for anyone to make, and the tooling was improving on the daily. Then, a young man named Dave Abramov came along and blew the world away with Redux. It was wild.
Unfortunately, I was very very new to programming, so I felt like everything was over my head, and I couldn’t really stand up well enough to catch the wave. Around the same time a new programming language was emerging as a safe and new way to program systems programs. You may know what I’m talking about. Yes, its.. Swift! Just kidding it’s Rust duh. I have been interested in Rust for the last 10 years and despite this I still feel like a New Rustacean. I didn’t catch that wave either.
Now we have a new swell emerging from the sea of computation. AI is useful for programmers, because the LLM’s are being trained and reinforced to do what programmers think is cool: competitive programming. And they’re pretty useful assistants if you have the patience to craft your prompts well enough. Heck, Claude 4 may have solved a lot of the previous issues, but I’ve yet to try it.
The main thing I’m excited about now is that (most)everyone is starting at the same point. Our skills are being reset, because this is new to us all, including the folks “growing” these models in their laboratories. This is how it must’ve felt to experienced devs when React came out: “finally, I have this huge amount of issues that I’m suddenly unlocked on. I’m Unburdened!”
I think this time it’s going to be a lot of fun to ride the wave, and look across and see a lot of legends standing right along-side me, because they’re noobies at this too! We’re all figuring it out together. Surfs up!