Will 2026 Be the Last Year I Write Code by Hand?

Source: Dev.to

A Personal Experiment

I realized something peculiar this weekend: this year might be the last year I ever write production code entirely on my own.

Fourteen months ago I experimented with Cursor by building an app without allowing myself to write any code. It was painful, but after three weeks I actually got there.

This weekend I ran a similar experiment using Claude Code. The app worked from my very first prompt and has rarely had any issues since. It has been an absolute blast to build like this. I haven’t written any code, but I have written a lot of English.

Times are definitely changing. This shift is affecting everyone in our space, juniors and seniors alike. It’s hard to know whether my fifteen years of experience debugging browser quirks will still be useful a year from now, and just as hard to imagine how junior developers will earn a seat at the table in the near future.

We may not be able to see exactly what is coming, but something is definitely on its way.

English as the New Programming Language

“The hottest new programming language is English.” — Andrej Karpathy
January 24 2023

Almost three years ago, Karpathy’s statement felt provocative. Now it feels accurate.

Perhaps machines will solve how we compose components in React. Maybe they will decide tabs versus spaces for us once and for all. Maybe it no longer matters whether templates live next to where they are used or in some carefully curated folder structure. Maybe the machine will show us a more efficient way to express intent and to interpret it.

What This Means for Developers

If my deep dive this week taught me anything, it is that we are writing less manual code with every passing day. If you want to build, ship, and compete this year, you’re going to have to leave more of the implementation in the hands of machines.

But experience may not disappear; it might just move up the stack.

• Not into writing more code, but into knowing what to build, how to ask for it, and when the answer looks right or subtly wrong.
• The keyboard matters less. Judgment matters more. Taste matters. Architecture still matters.

And if this all leads us toward “Judgment Day,” at least it comes with perks: no more bikeshedding, no more tabs versus spaces, and no more arguing about where to put the damn components.