Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:29:08] S1: Wow. [00:29:08] S0: ... it's always just been very practical for me where programming is a way to build the thing. It's not the end in itself. At some point, I personally fell into the rabbit hole of the beauty of programming. So, I wrote a book about typescript. Actually, at the time, it was the world's biggest typescript [inaudible 00:29:29] just because I fell in love with the language itself. And I got deep into functional programming and all the stuff. I think a lot of coders they get distracted by this. For me, it was always ... There is a beauty to programming, and, especially, to functional programming. There's a beauty to type systems. There's a certain, like, this buzz that you get when you solve a really [inaudible 00:29:54] math problem. It's similar when you balance the types or the program is just really beautiful. But it's really not the end of it. I think, for me, coding is very much a tool, and it's a way to do things. That said, not everyone feels this way. So, for example, there's one engineer on the team, Lena, who was still writing C++ on the weekends by hand, because for her she just really enjoys writing C++ by hand. And so, everyone is different. And I think even as this field changes, even as everything changes, there is always space to do this. There is always space to enjoy the art, and to do things by hand, if you want. [00:30:34] S1: Do you worry about your skills atrophying as an engineer? Is that something you worry about or is it just like, "This is just the way it's going to go"?
00:30:41 · Boris Cherny
[00:30:41] S0: I think it's just the way that it happens. I don't worry about it too much personally. I think, for me, programming is on a continuum. And way back in the day, software actually is relatively new. Right? If you look at the way programs are written today using software that's running on a virtual machine or something, this has been the way that we've been writing programs since probably the 1960s. So, it's been 60 years or something like that. Before that it was punch cards, before that it was switches. Before that, it was hardware. And before that, it was just, like, literally, pen and paper. It was a room full of people that were doing math on paper. And so, programming has always changed in this way. In some ways, you still want to understand the layer under the layer, because it helps you be a better engineer. And I think this will be the case maybe for the next year or so, but I think pretty soon it just won't really matter. It's just going to be the assembly code running under the program or something like this. At an emotional level, I feel like I've always had to learn new things. And as a programmer, it doesn't feel that new, because there's always new frameworks. There's always new languages. It's just something that we're quite comfortable with in the field. But at the same time, this isn't true for everyone. And I think for some people they're going to feel a greater sense of, I don't know, maybe, like, loss or nostalgia, or atrophy, or something like this.
00:32:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:32:00] S1: I don't know if you saw this, but Elon was saying that, "Why isn't the AI just writing binary straight to binary? Because what's the point of all this programming abstraction in the end?" [00:32:12] S0: Yeah. It's a good question. It totally can do that, if you want it too. [00:32:15] S1: Oh, man. So, what I'm hearing here is in terms ... There's always this question, "Should I learn to code? Should people in school learn to code?" What I heard from you is your take is in a year or two you don't really need to.
00:32:27 · Boris Cherny
[00:32:27] S0: My take is I think for people that are using Claude Code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under, but, yeah, in a year or two, it's not going to matter. I was thinking about what is the right historical analog for this? Because somehow we have to situate this thing in history, and figure out when have we gone through similar transitions? What's the right mental model for this? I think the thing that's come closest for me is the printing press. And so, if you look at Europe and in the mid 1400s, literacy was actually very low. There was sub-1% of the population, it was scribes, that they were the ones that did all the writing. They were the ones that did all the reading. They were employed by lords and kings that often were not literate themselves. And so, it was their job of this very tiny percent of the population to do this. And, at some point, Gutenberg and the printing press came along, and there was this crazy stat that in the 50 years after the printing press was built, there was more printed material created than in the thousand years before. And so, the volume of printed material just went way up. The cost went way down. It went down something, like, 100 X over the next 50 years. And if you look at literacy, it actually took a while, because of learning to read and write, it's quite hard, it takes an education system, it takes free time. It takes not having to work on a farm all day, so, that you actually have time for education, and things like this. But over the next 200 years it went up to 70% globally. So, I think this is the thing that we might see is a similar kind of transition. And there was actually this interesting historical document where there was an interview with some scribe in the 1400s about, "How do you feel about the printing press?" And they were actually very excited, because they were like, "Actually, the thing that I don't like doing is copying between books. The thing that I do like doing is drawing the art in books, and then doing the book binding. And I'm really glad that now my time is freed up." And it's interesting. As an engineer, I felt a parallel with this. Like, this is how I feel where I don't have to do the tedious work anymore of coding, because this has always been the detail of it.
00:34:43 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
It's always been the tedious part of it, and messing with [inaudible 00:34:51], and using all of these different tools. That was not the fun part. The fun part is figuring out what to build, and coming up with this. It's talking to users. It's thinking about these big systems. It's thinking about the future. It's collaborating with other people on the team, and that's what I get to do more of now. [00:35:07] S1: And what's amazing is that the tool you're building allows anybody to do this, people that have no technical experience can do exactly what you're describing. I've been doing a bunch of random little projects, and it's just, like, "Any time you get stuck just help me figure this out." And you get unblocked. I was an engineer earlier in my career for 10 years. And I just remember spending so much time on libraries and dependencies and things, and just like, "Oh my God. What do I do?" And then looking on [inaudible 00:35:34]. And now it's just like, "Help me figure this out," and, "Here's a step-by-step, one, two, three, four. Okay. We got this." [00:35:39] S0: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I was talking to an engineer earlier today. They're like, "They're writing some service [inaudible 00:35:44], and it's been a month already, and they built up the service. It's working quite well." And then I was like, "Okay. So, how do you feel writing it?" And he was like, "I still don't really know Go." And I think we're going to start to see more and more of this. It's, like, if you know that it works correctly and efficiently, then you don't actually have to know all the details.
00:35:39 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:35:39] S0: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I was talking to an engineer earlier today. They're like, "They're writing some service [inaudible 00:35:44], and it's been a month already, and they built up the service. It's working quite well." And then I was like, "Okay. So, how do you feel writing it?" And he was like, "I still don't really know Go." And I think we're going to start to see more and more of this. It's, like, if you know that it works correctly and efficiently, then you don't actually have to know all the details. [00:36:02] S1: Clearly, the life of a software engineer has changed dramatically. It's a whole new job now as of the past year or two. What do you think is the next role that will be most impacted by AI? Either within tech, like, product managers, designers, or even outside tech, just what do you think? Where do you think AI is going next?