February 11th, 2026

Hey Arto,

It's 2026, you are 9, and you asked me if I would teach you how to code. You've always been curious, always asking what I'm working on, and I love that about you. I would love to teach you. But mostly for the concepts. The code just feels so insignificant at this moment. Not because I don't want to share what I know or because I dislike this profession, but because the way we built software in my day feels increasingly like teaching you to hunt with a bow and arrow when rifles exist. 

We'd spend days writing every function by hand, debugging line by line. It required a type of craftsmanship, while impressive, not always the best use of our time and brainpower. We had to understand the baggage of design patterns, domain-driven design, and “clean code” to write cleanly structured code. When a junior developer joined the team, it felt like a double-edged sword - maintaining code quality while giving them autonomy without micromanaging. Code reviews became exercises in strain - manually scanning for issues, missing critical problems, struggling to understand the full scope of changes. We got there, in the end.

The simplest tasks - validating a form, sorting a list, connecting to an API - required writing dozens or hundreds of lines of code from scratch. We'd stare at the code and stack traces for hours, googling our way out, trying to figure out why our code crashed.

It was satisfying when and if we figured it out.

The communication chaos was something else entirely. Most code issues were communication issues. "This should be simple," a fellow developer would say about a feature they didn't understand, before disappearing for a week. We'd sit in silence in dailies, not daring to ask the super obvious questions because it felt too obvious, while nobody knew. We'd waste entire days in "knowledge transfer" meetings where nobody actually had the knowledge to transfer. Documentation lived in ten different places - wikis, Google Docs, comments, email threads - all of them outdated and contradicting each other. The worst was hearing "just ask Maarten how this works", only to discover that Maarten was equally confused and had been cargo-culting code patterns for years without understanding them. We'd waste weeks implementing the wrong solution because of miscommunication, or rewriting perfectly good code because nobody knew it already existed.

We're at an interesting turning point with AI in 2026. I've plunged in, and it feels liberating to focus solely on building. My mind is racing with possibilities. By the time you're my age, writing code line by line will seem as antiquated as my grandfather's stories that made me roll my eyes. In 2024/25, we once called it "vibe coding" because "vibe" was the best way to describe the quality.

Just one year later, the output became better than what most developers could write in a day. Some embrace this shift; others resist. But I’m slowly realising we're becoming the limiting factor in software creation, not the technology. Soon, English (or even Dutch) might be enough to build whatever you imagine. I've had my fair share of existential crises about this, but I've finally made peace with it. I'm curious to see what path you chose in this new world.

Hope you're doing well.

Dad