Quote-post Greg Isenberg on 'the west forgot how to code'

a post called "the west forgot how to code" is going viral among devs. the thesis: AI assisted devs ship faster but understand nothing. the next generation will be illiterate at the layer that matters. tbh, this panic happens every single decade. - assembly devs said C devs were illiterate. - C devs said java devs were illiterate. - java devs said react devs were illiterate. - react devs said no-code builders were illiterate. every single one of them was correct. every single one of them was also irrelevant within 10 years. the pattern is always the same. the new generation abstracts away the thing the old generation spent a career mastering. the old generation calls it dangerous. the new generation ships 10x faster & doesn't care. the market rewards speed. the cycle repeats. what's interesting is that the "illiterate" generation always wins. they win because they ship faster, build with less ego, & don't carry the baggage of what code is supposed to look like. they haven't been taught what's "proper." so they just build what works. the mass commoditization of coding is the mass democratization of building. the thing that used to take a team of 10 and $2 million now takes one person and a weekend. this means more competition. but it also means more weird, specific, niche products that never would have existed because the cost to build was too high. a million micro-products serving a million micro-audiences. the entire long tail of software just got unlocked. the people writing these posts are mourning a world where knowing how to code was a moat. it was. for decades. knowing how to code meant you had leverage that most people didn't have. that leverage is evaporating and it's uncomfortable. and I get it. I studied computer science at university. but the thing that replaced it is way more interesting. the new leverage is knowing what to build, who to build it for, and how to get it in front of them. that's harder to learn from a tutorial. that's harder to automate. & that's where the real compounding happens. the real question is "what happens when 100x more people can build" and the answer is a lot of garbage and a few things that change everything. that's always the answer. that was the answer with blogs, with youtube, with podcasts, with mobile apps. the gatekeepers always mourn the gate. that's terrifying if your identity is "I am a coder." it's the greatest opportunity in history if your identity is "I build things people want." okay, i had too much coffee. back to building.