Sep 12, 2025: An Ode to Coding
Let’s face it. Coding as we know it is dying and we need to bid it farewell. This will be comical and akin to those who would have lamented death of punched cards and assembly level programming – basically historical artifacts and old people hugging it. But for a generation that grew up with it, this is an emotional good bye moment.
Not sure about others but for me it was love at first sight with computers – gleaming green monochromatic monitors at school – I was stunned by what they could do, even more so when I figured out that I could “program” them to do something I created. It was fantasy land from there on – and for me it started with the BASIC programming language. I picked up programing with such frenzy that I could code games within a month, went to fractals, animations etc and could not have enought of it 🙂 . Though the languages kept changing to FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP and all the way till Kotlin, the joy of coding legibly, structuring it out, coming with good cool names for variables, adding neat comments and the like kept going – that is until AI came. I probably knew what I wanted to spend my life on knowing and learning, even before I entered 8th grade – such was the clarity of my passion. The countless nights spent on ‘debugging’ an issue with friends, coding a mini project – the list is endless – these will never be forgotten.
So RIP coding and hi to fellow OG coders out there who lived through this – what a time we had, what a story we got to tell, what a different world it was. Of course, we will motor on, coding AI for as long as that is possible but we also know the answer to how this is going to end 🙂
Aug 8, 2025: The age of the Machines
For a long in the history of our planet, we have been the dominant species, at least when it comes to intelligence and sheer brain power. That is about to change profoundly. I have written enough about the advent of AI but now I see that everyone around seems to have woken up to it and has come to some level of acceptance as well.
TCS laid off 12000 employees and I think the churn has begun in IT, at least at the lowest level. It is going to be extremely unprofitable to recruit huge numbers of under-prepared freshers anymore for body shopping jobs. Forget fresher recruitments, I highly suspect any kind of recruitment will be off the cards pretty soon. What is the point of a human ‘Tab Coding’ autogenerated code when that also can be done by AI. Instead the focus will turn to retaining just a handful of Architects, at least for a short period of time. They can come up with solutions and work with AI engineers to get to market much faster than we ever thought possible.
I call it the great AI subsumption. Going forward in a short period of time (think few years), AI will subsume traditional jobs both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally it will eat up more domains than just IT and vertically it will start at the lowest point but make redundant even the architects and eventually the CEOs as well. There is still scope for some horizontals to co-exist with AI but not for long. The end is near and clear.
I, like most of us around, have no clue on how things are going to pan out. So take this with a grain of salt. But one thing is for sure – a major disruption is underway and more than ever our adaptability is going to be tested. There are already talks of AGI being very near (think AI super-intelligence) and of UBI (Universal Basic Income for everyone – as there are no jobs to be had and hence no salary, so Government will give a subsidy salary to all). These are definitely scary times but also within that fear there exists a child’s curiosity to see what is going to happen next.
Dec 14, 2024: Once upon a time
These days I am buzzing with excitement, it seems to me that we are on a roller coaster ride in tech currently. [In fact I had to update this post twice in the last few days to include Google XR and then again for Veo 2] Most of us are aware of ChatGPT of course, and it is marvellous no doubt. But our brains are extrapolating that things will change drastically in 20 years or so. Even the most optimistic amoung us, think that it will be another 10 years before another big thing arrives.
But ‘Big’ things are happening right now, right here. The pace of change is both alarming and exhilarating. Take Sora or Veo 2 for example – what was once a fantasy (Text to Video) is a reality now. Notebook LM from Google – I was listening to a podcast of 2 AIs discuss in great detail a summary my notes that they had created. For the most part it was absolutely believable and oddly soothing compared to having to read the entire notes myself.
Also from Google we have the Willow, a quantum chip that is going to revolutionise computation for certain types of problems. It can do stuff in 5 mins that would take a super computer more than the time already spent in this universe. Of course it is just suited for certain tasks but it is still mind bending.
The important take away is that tech growth is not going to be linear like the recent Apple Intelligence or Google XR glasses, not even exponential, it would most likely be double-exponential. This is wonderful news if you are a tech enthusiast. But then, great changes come with great disruptions as well. If I were an artist today and not very tech-inclined I would be worried. If I were in any business involving data but don’t have an inkling of AI, I would be worried as hell.
Then we have the ‘Unknown – Unknowns’. With our limited brain power we are only thinking of stuff, well, that we can think of 🙂 Like how the great Asimov imagined that futuristic tech meant books will be opened and pages turned by machines – he never could think of semiconductors and Kindle. Similarly, we think that AI will do this, make that better, but my bet is that we are not even remotely prepared for what is in store in future – a future that is very close by
The fact is that we are generating history at a faster pace. A world without smartphones feels like a long time ago, a world without computers, unthinkable. A world without AI would feel the same, in just a few years from now.