What I Talk About When I Talk About Coding

As long as you have running shoes and a good road you can run to your heart's content.

The first program I ever wrote was a small game for the TI-83 graphing calculator. I was in middle school, and the game was simple — push the Enter button as fast as you can. I got to watch my classmates pull out their connection cables and copy the game code from one calculator to another, so they could play it when they got bored in class.

A computer costs more than a pair of running shoes, but once you have one you can code to your heart's content.

Just as a river flows to the sea, growing older and slowing down are just part of the natural scenery...

The rise of code-writing machines has caused an existential crisis, of sorts, for those of us humans who write code. I've heard one CEO tell their company (paraphrasing), "In a few years, only one out of ten software engineers will still have their job."

I don't think that's true. In my experience, code-writing machines function more-or-less like any other tool — they make me better at my job, but I'm still the person driving the machine.

I run in order to acquire the void.

Why do we write code? I see code as a way to do create something that others find useful, even if all the other people want to do is goof around in middle school.

That's why the rise of the machines doesn't scare me. All the machines can do is piece together things that already exist. I'm still the one creating something new.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

That's not to say that the next few years won't be hard for our industry. I'm particularly worried about our talent pipeline. Where will the next generation of experienced practitioners come from, when no one's hiring inexperienced practitioners?

This leads to a call for action — I think we need to start building a "creator" mindset into more roles at companies and organizations. Vibe-coding will let more people manifest their ideas, and turning those manifested ideas into maintainable infrastructure requires an experienced practitioner. The more people we can encourage to choose the suffering required to become a experienced coding practitioner, the better things we'll be able to create. In other words, without a dedicated pipeline of junior software engineers, we'll need more people to move laterally from non-software positions into coding.

The title of this post, and the quotes in it, are taken from Haruki Murakami's excellent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which was in turn inspired by Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. This is the companion blog post to a identically-titled lightning talk I gave at SatCamp 2025.