It is time.

My first brush with writing code was when I was around 10 years old. My father taught Computer Science in the Indian Armed Forces. I would accompany him to class and get my hands on the 8086 machines. I hated having to timeshare with my brother.

Adjacent to the Computer Science lab was a gigantic library, of which I also had a free run. So I got a copy of QBasic and made an ASCII car run across the screen.

Writing code felt natural. It was intuitive. I got it. It was the easiest way to build something and see it come to fruition.

Over the years, I felt that programming has still fundamentally remained the same. We got fancy languages and powerful abstractions, but at its core, it was still about translating human logic into machine instructions.

Computer programming has been this way for close to a few decades now. For a lot of us, it is a fundamental skill set.

Sometimes I feel it is part of our identity. We know how to code. We can think in code. Given a piece of software, we can imagine the code which powers it. We get it. Not everybody does. We are different.

At NonBioS we are building an AI which will replace programmers. When I show NonBioS to some of our beta testers, the immediate emotion is one of disbelief. "How does it work?" That's what everyone asks.

It takes some time for things to settle. And then the more important emotion comes in. "What does it mean?" - is what everybody asks.

Programming, as we know it, is going away. If not now, then in another six months. Maybe a year. Worst case, two.

"What does AI mean?" - This is the most important question everyone is asking right now.

"What does it mean for us?" - This is the most important question which comes next.

Programmers the world over are at the forefront of this change. So this question will come to us first. And we will have to answer it.

The difficult part here, as in a lot of other things, is related to identity. Programmers is who we are. It gave us purpose. And meaning. For far too long.

But it is going away. For sure. We have to take a step back. It is time.