Coding Is Dead, Long Live Programming

Summary In this post, we argue that the role of a coder now belongs to a coding agent, but that the distinct role of a programmer defines the software engineer's role in interacting with the agent to produce computer programs. At the heart of this, I think, are answers to questions we have about software maintenance, cognitive debt, and the education of junior engineers. Coding is Dead Commentators in the tech industry have recently declared that “coding is dead.” The triggers for this statement are: LLMs, whose transformer architecture excels at pattern recognition and translation, have achieved a high success rate on key coding tasks, particularly since the December 2025 model releases. The improvements in coding agents have pushed the success rate for the code that an LLM generates above the 80% threshold, where agents can begin the journey toward independently doing work without human review for short tasks and increasingly lengthening. A broader understanding of good practices in…