AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did

AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did By Zed A. Shaw on Mar 6, 2026 AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did You've read the posts. You've seen the pundits. You've heard the rumors. Programming is dead. AI killed it. Nobody needs to code when Claude can do it for you. Everyone's worried. "This thing I loved has died and AI killed it!" They're replacing us with AI! Wrong. AI didn't kill programming. You killed programming decades ago by stripping it of all individuality and curiosity to satisfy the whims of giant corporations. You created universities that taught only one language and trained programmers to never think of programming as personal expression. You turned programming into a sterile profession who's only purpose is making other people money. You even went so far as to hunt down and threaten anyone who dared to disagree with you. You threatened their jobs, their reputations, and their mental health over petty bullshit like an underscore in a variable name . You worked extremely hard to frame programming as only a profession that serves corporations, and made sure anyone who threatened the great corporations was shut down, ridiculed, humiliated, and fired. So everyone fell in line, made only projects for corporations, and talked only about how they could best serve corporations. Even when they tried to fight back against the corporate mindset they came up with a movement that's still about corporate efficiency . Congratulations bootlickers, you got what you wanted. A boring soulless profession with no originality and a total focus on what corporations want with no regard for individualism and free expression. "Everyone should code exactly the same like good little robots." That's you, bootlicker. And now you think programming is dead? It died years ago. You're just finally smelling the rotting corpse while AI devours the carcass. There it is, on the ground, next to the knee pads and chapstick you use when you clean off Zuck's Gucci slippers with your willing tongue. Why Your Version of Programming is Dying I'll take some extra time to explain why the Corporate Bootlicker Programming Style is dying: You created a society that frames programming as a subservient profession by educating and socializing programmers to be dependent on corporations for everything. The primary way you did this was with substandard education practices: You taught only Java or C# at universities, two languages sold by corporations only used by corporations. You failed to teach programmers anything about running their own business, creating their own products, or expressing their own ideas. You created courses that purposefully indoctrinated new programmers so they would be subservient to the creators of the languages they're learning. You frequently claimed that competing languages were "Considered Harmful" to learn, despite not one single bit of actual research supporting that, and mountains of research contradicting this. You also failed to teach programmers how to stand up for their profession and resist managers controlling how they work so they would only code using expensive tools from these corporations. This produced generations of programmers who believed (falsely) that their only option was to work for someone else, that they could never say "no" to their employers, and who were economically captured by large corporations because they never learned how to learn new languages. You then utilized this learned subservience to convince programmers that it wasn't safe to release their code without a permissive license. This involved false threats of lawsuits, threats that nobody would use their projects, and false claims that it was their duty to society. You then convinced these programmers that trillion dollar companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are exactly the same "user" as a single individual or small business. You pushed the idea that it was "discriminatory" to classify them as not users, despite the insane power difference. You then spent decades convincing programmers that they don't deserve public credits for their work, so that the corporations don't have to admit they use open source software. You then harassed programmers who did anything that might make these corporations uncomfortable so they could have an easier time assimilating projects. This involved everything from demanding corporate friendly licenses and names to demanding full corporate level quality assurances and coding standards. Finally, you threatened any project that tried used creator friendly licenses with false claims that the OSI represents all programmers or is some kind of government regulatory body so they aren't allowed to license their works how they want. After all of this work, the world's code was being fully exploited by your trillionaire "users." Everyone's code was the same, was packaged cleanly, was easily used, and no credit to the creators was required. It was easily searchable online, easily downloaded, easily stripped, and easily added to any project. All that these corporations needed was some tool to automate what they were already doing and strip the copyright off. Programming was dead. Programming was so dead that even when programmers tried to create anti-corporate movements they still framed them in the terms of corporations and not individuals. Not one pundit pushes Personal Programming Processes and even if they do they think "process" means how your personal work will function in a team . No, idiots, "process" is a word that's been used by creative individuals to mean how they personally approach their works. After decades of this Corporate Bootlicker Programming Style movement programming was ripe for harvesting. All it took was one simple revolution in a few generative techniques--and enough money to blow on mountains of GPUs--and your version of programming was done. Good Riddance The best thing about this era of programming is that your plan worked, and now you will either have to accept it or just go away. These AI tools are just getting started and will most likely create an entirely new branch of programming that fully utilizes the tools. In some ways, many programmers have your dumb ass to thank for paving the way for better automated production of the bullshit coked out managers think up. The rise of AI also means nobody has to give a shit about your corporate bootlicker opinions. You used to get some mileage running around the internet threatening people who put underscores in variable names, but these tools will be very good at following those rules. Those petty obnoxious formatting rules are already automated so it makes sense AI will make your grift pointless. This means that all you trolls who memorize all the rules but never make anything have nothing. The tools beat you on the memorization, and the existence of the tools exposes your inability to actually do something. The real threat AI poses is to these open source projects and corporations. You see the irony of all your decades of work destroying the humanity in programming is that it's culminated in a tool that frees programmers to do what they want. What these tools also do is make it trivial for individuals to compete with established projects and corporations. We've already seen how Cloudflare quickly replaced Next.js , and this has already started happening with other projects . But I don't think these AI tools pose a threat to individual programmers. My prediction is it will free us from the corporate framing, and provide a whole new way to realize our visions. More from Learn Code the Hard Way AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did You spent decades sucking all humanity out of programming and you're surprised it worked? Opinion Published Mar 6, 2026 Announcing the Great Rewrite Project I'm documenting my rewrite of this site from JavaScript to Go starting March 1, 2026. Announcement Published Feb 22, 2026 I Made You a Baby Rogue in Python A first attempt at a very simple Rogue in Python for beginners to study and learn from. This may become the basis of the new 6th Edition of LPTHW. 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