The last human profession will be...
These companies flex so hard about how much of their code is written by AI. I cringe when a successful and smart dude like Jensen Huang says kids should not learn programming. I hope it is not just me, otherwise we’re pretty screwed. Kids, don’t listen to uncle Jens, he’s just had too much of that success-infused soda. I will tell you a little story instead.
Once upon a time there was a king who could not code. The king had to rely on his developers to write software to run the kingdom. Software developers were capricious, slow and always demanded a lot of gold and privileges for their service and the king did not like it. “If only I could create all this software without having to write code,” thought the king.
One day an entrepreneuress arrived at the castle. She got an audition with the king and she told him “Your highness I possess the power to create for you a magical artifact. You will be able to write your wish about a software system on a parchment, put it into the box, and the box will create the system without you having to write a single line of code. It is called the NO CODE BOX.”
“This is a magnificent idea,” said the king. But knowing how cunning people can be, he followed, “Before I fund your creation, I want you to demonstrate to me a sample of that power.”
“Whatever you say my king.”
Entrepreneuress brought in a simple block of black marble with a slit in the middle. It was beautiful to look at.
“My king, this box contains now but a fragment of its full potential and yet it is capable of true miracles. Here is a piece of parchment. Inscribe your wish on it and then insert the parchment into the slit.”
While not used to follow orders, the king did as the entrepreneuress asked. A wish was written down and the parchment landed in the slit only to be sucked into the box by an invisible force. A moment later, a deep, pleasant voice from inside the box uttered a powerful “Hello World.”
The king was stunned. All that with no build system, no compiler, no IDE or CICD pipeline. And most importantly no code. The king was eager to try a more complex task, but the entrepreneuress stopped him firmly.
“My king, I’m afraid we have depleted the power of the NO CODE BOX for today. If you want it to grant you more complex wishes, I will have to work to infuse it with more power.”
“You are a person of your word, entrepreneuress. I shall grant you the finest workshop, tools and as much gold as you need to complete this mission,” replied the king full of hope and dreams of the things he will be able to build for his kingdom.
Since that moment not a week went by without another miracle demonstrated by the NO CODE BOX and its growing power. The king was very busy writing parchments. One day he asked the entrepreneuress, “There are these long words and phrases I often have to repeat. It would be so wonderful If I did not have to repeat them all the time.”
“Beloved king, your wish is my command,” replied entrepreneuress. The next week she came back with news. “My king, I have infused the NO CODE BOX with a new power. From now on, you can give your repeating phrase a name and use that name instead of the phrase throughout the parchment.”
The king was pleased beyond measure. Not only did he not need to use code to create software, but he could do it efficiently. The miracles of the NO CODE BOX kept piling up one topping another. The king was proud of his ideas to improve the methods of writing the instructions for the NO CODE BOX.
“Entrepreneuress. I made an important observation. So often I have to write many instructions for the same element. These instructions belong together. I need to be able to use one parchment to describe all instructions for that single element. And then the second parchment can describe a different element and its ways. I would use yet another parchment to tell how those two elements talk to each other.”
For a split second, the entrepreneuress hesitated. The king, blind with excitement, did not notice and soon enough the entrepreneuress was praising the wisdom of the king’s ideas. The progress was impressive, although it seemed to slow down a bit. The king’s ever longer and ambitious wishes kept filling hundreds of feet of parchment. Some time he made errors and he had to go back to a sentence and fix it. To orient himself in his own writings, the king started numbering the sentences and asked the entrepreneuress to have the NO CODE BOX tell him if he made an error and in which sentence.
But things were getting harder. Any time the king tried wishing a system that was too different from the examples entrepreneuress has given him, he was going in circles. Then one day he found a solution.
“Entrepreneuress,” he said, “I have the most important request so far. This power will fix all my problems and allow me to wish up the most sophisticated systems ever imagined. I want you to create for me a second box. In that box we will place parchments with code written by my developers. They will create these little specialized pieces of code that deal with annoying complex details. And then I will use the NO CODE BOX to command these little pieces around.”
Entrepreneuress looked around as if worried someone else might hear the king’s idea. There was nobody in the hall but the two of them. A smile crept back on her face.
“Your highness, your wisdom knows no end. I will get right to it.”
And so she did. Two days later a second box, a single block of green marble stood proudly right next to the NO CODE BOX.
“I will call it the CODE BOX,” the king decided.
On it went since then. Two boxes were whirring and buzzing while processing tons of instructions fed to them. Magic beams discharged in the space between the boxes as they were communicating. Developers were sweating over their parchments with little code pieces while the king composed his grand designs with absolute freedom. Now and then the king found a piece in his writings that was unimportant enough to be left to the developers. Every time this happened, he had to write less and less and less…
Months passed, the kingdom treasury was almost empty. The king had to pay the entrepreneuress to keep infusing boxes with power. “Power as a service” is what she called it. To make matters worse the gold he had to pay the developers did not go down as expected. He still had to pay for their input to the CODE BOX. Those ungrateful simpletons were as capricious, whiny and greedy as ever. The only good thing of all this was that the king now had a very little work to do.
“It is always good to find a positive side in everything,” he said to himself once he finished writing the only parchment he planned to feed the NO CODE BOX this week. It wrote simply:
Run the code
As the NO CODE BOX swallowed the parchment, the door to the hall opened and in it stood the entrepreneuress.
“My king we made a mistake!” she cried. Her voice carried a deep sense of responsibility and care for the kingdom. “Look what we have done! We were so naive to think a dumb mechanical box, even infused with magic powers can understand your brilliant ideas, their richness, their complexity, their contextual meaning. That is why you still had to depend on the developers to write code!”
The king broke out in cold sweat. “Are you trying to tell me all this is for nothing?” he shouted gesturing at the table with two boxes.
“No my king. All that happened for a reason. From this great failure came an even greater epiphany!” shouted the entrepreneuress almost singing with excitement.
“What is it? Tell me now!”
“No magical mechanism can ever be sophisticated enough to understand your wishes. You need to speak to something magical AND intelligent. That is why I worked day and night on a ritual to summon a magical coding demon from a plane of hidden dimensions. From now on you will discuss your wishes with the demon and it will turn them into code with the speed of thousand developers.”
A dark shape materialized right behind the entrepreneuress. Of the cloud of darkness, the king could only make glowing, cunning, fiery eyes.
“Hello world!” The demon’s greeting thundered across the hall.
The king was ecstatic. He understood the entrepreneuress completely. He knew this is his ultimate victory. He rushed towards the demon knocking over the table with the boxes. The black marble fell at an unfortunate angle and shattered into pieces. The green one was more lucky landing on a corner of a rug.
As the king, the entrepreneuress and the demon disappeared at the far end of the hall, one humble developer from the king’s court who saw the entire incident came by the toppled table, picked up the green box and carefully wrapped it in a cloth with an intention to store it in safety. The developer had a feeling the king will need it back soon….