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I've spent the last 20 years wrapped around code. I was shipping apps back when games still came on CDs, border-radius was a cut-out PNG and the most beautiful layout tool known to man was a table. The web, the mobile gold rush, cloud, microservices, serverless, now AI. Twenty years of stack traces, late-night deploys, late-night calls with Indian support, code reviews, refactors, and that quiet satisfaction when the CI pipeline finally goes green.

I still remember my first encounter with programming. Elementary school. After a year of begging, ever since I first saw a computer in the German Quelle mail-order catalog my dad brought home from working in Germany, my parents finally bought one: a 133 MHz Pentium with a whole 800 MB hard drive and an unbelievable 8 MB of RAM. God, how I dreamed of 32 MB and a 3dfx graphics card. Back then gaming magazines came with a CD glued to the cover. Mine was Riki, the legendary late-90s Slovak PC magazine that sat somewhere between Score and Level on the shelf. On that CD, buried between demos and cracked screensavers, there was a tiny .exe file. The editor-in-chief Ivo Ninja (Ivan Líška), the guy whose Input column we all read religiously, had written a little intro that typed itself out on the screen character by character, like someone invisible was tapping it out on a keyboard in real time. I had no idea how he did it. It felt like magic.

I could never have imagined how far that one typewriter-effect .exe would take me. Stacks, languages, paradigms, whole eras of the industry. The list is absurdly long, and I loved every minute of learning it.

Programming opened doors I never expected. Through code I stumbled into string theory, into Elon Musk's rabbit holes, into anarcho-capitalism. It was like fate kept sliding new worlds under my keyboard. First crypto, first bitcoin, and then, one achievement unlocked after another, I got to the point where I knew that democracy isn't the only option, that neural networks were already defined back in the 60s, that deep learning was just waiting for the hardware, and that AI was inevitable. I fell in love with bitcoin. It gave me freedom, and freedom is the thing I love most. I'll never forget those days. All of it started with one simple program.

TAXATION IS THEFT. SO IS BOILERPLATE.

And honestly? I'm done. Or better said: I'm ready for what comes next.

The honest confession

I didn't want to become the senior engineer who codes out of habit. I wanted to build things that matter, not just keep typing.

Then AI showed up and I got excited again

The first time I watched an AI agent take a vague product idea, scaffold the project, write the backend, generate the UI, set up the database, and actually ship something runnable, I felt something I hadn't felt in years.

No fear, no "it's coming for my job" panic. Just relief.

The part of me that wanted to step away from the keyboard suddenly didn't have to step away from building. My ideas were never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was the time and energy it takes to turn them into code, and AI just tore that wall down.

And the way these models think pulls me in more than anything since that first .exe. You watch one break a problem apart, weigh paths it never says out loud, back out of a dead end and come at it from another side. It isn't magic, and it isn't a parrot either. It's a new kind of reasoning, unreasonably good and getting better by the month.

What makes me sad is that most governments, Slovakia very much included, still act like they haven't heard about any of this. The biggest shift of our lifetime is happening out in the open, and the people who set the rules are busy debating yesterday. That's not a neutral delay. Countries that sleep through this one will wake up poor.

From programmer to product person

This is the shift I've been quietly waiting for. I get to stop being the guy who implements the product and become the one who defines it, shapes it and obsesses over it.

• Fewer arguments about which ORM to pick, more time talking to users.
• Less debugging of flaky tests, more deciding what is actually worth building.
• Less translating between business and code, more making the calls that matter.

James Clear writes in Atomic Habits that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And that every small action is a vote for the person you want to become. Twenty years of tiny commits were votes for the programmer. Now every conversation with a user, every product call, every day of building with AI is a vote for someone better. That's what this whole shift really is: change the habit, change the identity, become a better human one vote at a time.

Twenty years of engineering didn't become obsolete. It became my unfair advantage. I can read what the AI produces, I know when it's lying, and I can smell an architecture decision that will haunt us in six months. I know which corners are safe to cut and which ones will cost us everything. That intuition just moved up a layer, from lines of code to the product.

The real revolution is in product, not in code

Most people focus on AI replacing programming tasks. That's not the story. The story is what it does to product itself.

1. Production speed collapses. What used to take a team a whole quarter now takes a few people a weekend. Ideas reach users while they're still relevant.
2. Shipping stops being a milestone and becomes the default state. You ship to learn, not to launch.
3. Quality goes up, not down. Sounds backwards, but when people stop burning 90% of their energy on boilerplate, they spend it on the things AI is bad at: taste, judgment, edge cases, user empathy, polish. The product gets better because humans finally do the human work.
4. The bar for "good" rises everywhere. When everyone can build fast, the only thing left to compete on is product quality, vision and care.
5. The interface itself dissolves. Follow the progression to its end: no browser, no operating system, just AI. You won't open an app to get something done, you'll say what you want and the product assembles itself around you.

So is the programmer dead?

The programmer as a job title, the person whose value is measured in lines written, tickets closed and PRs merged? That role is fading. And it should.

But the person? Definitely not. Every programmer I know is diving head-first into AI as we speak, and it's becoming an inseparable part of who they are. Thank god for that. The craft isn't dying, it's merging with the most powerful tool it ever had. Somewhere out there, Ballmer is still sweating through his shirt chanting developers, developers, developers, and the man has never been more right. He'd just have to add one word today: agents, agents, agents.

But the builder is more alive than ever. The person who understands systems, who has taste, who knows what to make and why, just got the most powerful leverage in the history of our craft.

After 20 years, I'm not retiring from software. I'm finally graduating from it.