Coding Is Solved. Now What?
How far we've run from the hardware, and a question about where we're running to.
In 1945, programming meant standing inside the machine.
ENIAC filled an 1,800-square-foot room in Philadelphia, built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. To give it a new problem, six women, the first programmers most people have never heard of, moved cables between plugboards and flipped thousands of switches by hand. A new program could take days. The program was the hardware.
In 1952, Grace Hopper built A-0, the first compiler. Nobody wanted it. As she told it later, she had a working compiler and nobody would touch it, because everyone knew computers could only do arithmetic. They could not understand English.
Remember that year. 1952.
Climbing away from the metal
What followed was seventy years of the same move: one more layer between the human and the hardware.
Assembly gave us names instead of numbers. C (1972) let you write once and run anywhere. C++ (1985) stacked objects on top. Java (1995) and C# (2000) took away memory management entirely.
Then the languages started reading like sentences. JavaScript (1995), TypeScript (2012), and Python, released in 1991, older than Java, turned out to be the closest thing to plain English we'd ever had. for name in names: print(name). You can guess what that does without ever having written code.
Every rung moved us further from the metal. Nobody was trying to get closer.
The last rung
On January 24, 2023, Andrej Karpathy posted seven words: "The hottest new programming language is English."
That same year I was at Deloitte, using ChatGPT to generate test data. Two windows: VS Code on the left, ChatGPT on the right, me copy-pasting objects back and forth all day. I remember thinking, why isn't this just inside my IDE? Or my terminal? One interface. I really did think about it. Then I went back to copy-pasting.
In February 2025, Anthropic shipped Claude Code, an agent that lives in your terminal. The same month, Karpathy posted again: building an app while barely touching his keyboard, talking to his editor through a dictation app, accepting every change without reading the diff. He called it "vibe coding."
So here's the math. Hopper was told computers couldn't understand English in 1952. Karpathy was coding in English, out loud, in 2025.
Seventy-three years. From "nobody would touch it" to "I barely touch the keyboard."
And it kept climbing. By December 2025, 80% of Karpathy's code was written by agents. In April 2026, on stage at Sequoia, he called vibe coding old news; the new thing was "agentic engineering," where the agent writes and the human specs, reviews, and tests. Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, hasn't written a line by hand since November 2025. Three days ago someone flagged a problem in Claude Code and he replied: "Coding is solved, bugs are not yet solved. Fix incoming."
You can now describe a feature the way Tony Stark talks to Jarvis, and most of the time it shows up. Not always in one shot. But that gap is closing faster than the last one did.
Now we're running from the keyboard
Wispr Flow, the dictation app developers are ditching their keyboards for, started somewhere stranger. Wispr was founded in 2021 to build a wearable that read neural signals so you could type by silently mouthing words. No keyboard. No voice. Just intent.
The hardware wasn't ready, so in 2024 they pivoted to software and mapped it to the one key nobody uses. Hold fn, talk, let go. By mid-2026 the company was reportedly raising at close to $2 billion, and its roadmap talks about wearables again: rings, watches, glasses.
The keyboard got replaced by a single key. The single key is about to be replaced by nothing.
If that lands: you're washing dishes, or on a date, you half-think about Monday's feature, and somewhere an agent picks up the intent and starts working.
The pattern
Two stories, one shape. Seventy-three years running from the machine's instructions. Two years running from its keys.
Nikola Tesla spent his last decades chasing a wireless world, no cables anywhere. He never built it. But look at what we're building: code without syntax, typing without keys.
My bet for what goes next: the mouse. Why drag a cursor around when the screen can just watch where you're looking?
So, a question instead of an answer. Are we building better tools? Or have we just spent eighty years trying to escape the hardware?