"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." ―  Frederik Pohl What's the traffic jam of the future of coding?

No software tool will change fundamental brain chemistry. There is a limit to how fast humans can learn, because learning and thinking is a physical process that involves the actual movement of atoms and building of biological cells. There's potentially huge, not well understood benefits to effort, toil and failure in long term knowledge acquisition and design. There's potential catastrophes around superpowering one part of our abilities and not others, a bit like early attempts to eliminate sleep. I think @ibdknox has written before about the benefits of pointless busywork in coding (manually balancing brackets, manual renames of variables etc). Sometimes confronting a problem in it's purest conceptual form is just too big chunks to chew. So I would guess the "traffic jam" feels like those times when you actually have loads of time on your hands but you don't seem to be able to start anything because there's no little problems. I linked this Ted Chiang story before which highlights some of the arguably negative effects of the previous literacy revolution - http://web.archive.org/web/20131204053806/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang

Funny, I’ve never thought about it like this, but now when you say “traffic jam” and coding, my brain immediately goes to package management, libraries, and projects — too many people driving their own cars and too few people interested in car sharing.

From Alan Kay’s “A personal computer for children of all ages” from 1972.

The future of coding is that people won’t be coding at all 🤣

Requires knowing what the automobile equivalent is first 😅. One way to answer is to assume what the automobile is and think of what happens when there is an abundance of it. Say the automobile is everyone can code. Software Engineers go extinct or almost?

I don't think the future of coding programming will be that people don't practice it anymore. The core of the programming activity is managing the complexity of automatic behaviors, whatever is the underlying system. The progress in programming only means simplifying things that were complex, and in the same time making impossible things become feasible but complex. So there will always be something complex that needs people to work on.

Oh by that, I mean it’s ubiquitous. like “everyone does some maths but we aren’t all mathematicians” sort of way or like how human computers don’t have jobs anymore, it is not because we are no longer computing. And things that used to require software experts might just need a domain expert - (to get something basic at least)

The traffic jam would be everyone is flinging code like everyone is now a writer... in the micro-form of posts and tweets, that are now swamping the earth I think a lot about the micro-form of coding that people use to amuse themselves and get something small done - maybe if it’s done right, there‘ll be less writing/venting out in the world and more getting results