Manual coding is still possible — humanity built the entire digital world with it until 2024 — but it's prohibitively slow now, snail pace, no matter how fast the typing. "But I like coding" has become a luxury belief, like insisting on hand-painting cars in a factory where robots do it automatically. Neither competitive, nor cheap, nor practical, nor fast — ultimately selfish, slowing down traffic for everyone else. Those who want to gallop on horses should stay on their ranch, not take it to the highway.
No healthy creative individual ever learned to code just to code — coding is a tool, and those who learned it for its own sake are either autistic or rule-following drones mass-produced by education institutions to serve industry. The real drive was always building: games, music players, chat systems, portals. Programming was the means, not the end. Who actually wants to just "code"? Completing Jira tickets until retirement? That's a trained employee who learned to love servitude — not a creative, not a builder.
Builders now get 30x productivity, system designers get 30x, while single-trick-pony Jira ticket completers panic and deny. AI separates those who think in systems from those who think in syntax — architects from translators. Some engineers get the 20-30x multiplier and just deliver, others complain, deliver slow, blame AI, ask wrong questions, write wrong prompts, create bugs. 80% of engineers struggle even with AI.
They're brick layers, window makers, roofers — not architects. They don't know how to design a full house, they just want to pay bills and loans. Now a robot shows up laying bricks, you set direction and it builds a wall. Brick layers hate it, architects love it. Before, they were all lumped together as "software engineers" — always fundamentally different, now visibly so. Most never code on their own time, never learn after school, never build their own systems — they do what managers force them to do 9-to-5, then cut it out. Learning AI, which invalidates everything force-memorized in school, is painful. Clock in, pad time, clock out — minimum learning, minimum change, minimum pain.
Consider liberals — college-educated urbanites in tech, law, finance — the most gullible, brainwashed, credentialed idiots civilization has produced. Programmed, educated, constantly re-educated to follow certain beliefs and core values, but every directive is initiated, executed, and enforced by corporations serving only corporate interests. Feminism puts women to work for more labor supply, importing foreigners provides cheap labor, egg freezing keeps women at desks longer, four-year vesting cliffs are golden handcuffs, encouraging debt creates dependency — they can't say no, can't walk away, need the job.
Everything corporations want is repackaged and sold to them as virtue: "diversity is our strength," "women who code," "immigrants built this country." Criticizing these groups at work is forbidden because corporations need their cheap labor and dependency — more diverse workforce means less unionizing, less worker cohesion. Everything liberals believe serves corporate interests — quintessential midwits. Following rules and corporate agendas without critical thinking can only get you so far, which is exactly as far as the syntax translator coders got: mass-educated to become corporate drones, never built anything on their own, now obsolete. Executives know this, know it can never be explained to the midwits, so they sell virtue instead. Midwits feel good about themselves, the good people, actively promoting corporate propaganda against their own interests, watching themselves get priced out of their own hometowns, smiling the whole time.
"I like to code" is "I like to ride horses" spoken right after cars were invented. Taking a horse to the highway while everyone else drives isn't preserving craft — it's just being in the way.