Computers Finally Care About Code - David Whitney Skip to content ← All postsMonday, 20 July 2026·7 min read

Everyone’s convinced that AI has made code disposable. They’ve got it exactly backwards: for the first time, computers actually depend on it.

A few months ago I wrote a piece that mulled, with some sadness, over the fact that programming languages might be over. A dramatic sentiment, but one coming from a place of watching the onwards industrialisation of the production of software.

You see this thread everywhere – people talking about how software has changed, and how the programming part of the development process is rapidly losing importance in the face of verification. There’s absolutely truth in the idea that writing code matters less to developers than it used to, but all it takes is a look around the average codebase to realise that most people never really cared about writing code anyway. If they did, the quality of software in the world probably wouldn’t be as mediocre as it mostly is.

But I did. I really cared about writing code the whole time.

So there’s a sadness for me in this, because programming is the most edifying, therapeutic part of the job. The mechanical pleasure of thinking and finding the form of expression that best fits the problem. It’s probably no surprise to anybody that I feel that way; I’ve written countless essays and talks about how programming makes me feel. About how the process itself drives the self-improvement cycle you need to reach a good conclusion. But it’s ok – everyone doesn’t have to feel how I feel.

Over the last few months, as the frontier models have got better at writing above-average code, I’ve been having an increasing number of conversations with friends and peers, especially in the language design communities, lamenting that even the act of programming language design might be over. I had a stark conversation recently with a friend who is likely one of the ten most successful programming language designers ever, where they were seriously questioning whether their skills were valuable to the future of software. I’ve had conversations about how the “best language” now is simply the one with the most training data , the one most amenable to industrialisation. About how everything ends with JavaScript.

But recently I’ve come to the conclusion that code is probably just as important to the industry as it ever was – and that it’s about to enter an era of severe underappreciation.

Code was always for people

The weird thing to me about people not really caring about code is that code only ever existed for people .

It’s easy to thoughtlessly assume that programming languages and code are made for machines. But machines never cared about code, or code quality, or the quality of expression in software.

To understand this, we have to answer two questions:

What really is code?

Who is the audience?

Code itself is a constrained form of communication that programmers use to describe their process (algorithms) and their mental model (structure) of a problem space. It’s notation , in the same way that a map represents a space, or sheet music guides a musician.

Many people, even most programmers, would probably do a double-take at this definition, because experientially it seems like you “write code that runs on computers” – but this simply isn’t true.

The code you write is compiled or interpreted by other programs that understand the representation a specific machine or piece of hardware needs. The machines themselves literally only care about machine code ; the layers of abstraction, shape, and design we lay on top of them are stripped away until only opcodes and hardware remain.

The machines never cared about software design. It was all a map for them to get to the actual implementation they needed, and the map is not the territory .

The audience? That’s the easier question. You are the audience for code.

Code is a constrained form of communication, between programmer and programmer, to transmit ideas in a form that we can best understand, maintain and modify in the future.

Sometimes you are the other programmer you’re communicating with, just at a different place in time – but the code was always for people, and never for the machines .

The models understand code like humans

If code was always only for people, and machines are now writing an increasing amount – bordering on the majority – of it, why do I think code suddenly has greater longevity than before?

Computers finally depend on the code to reach new solutions .

Where previously humans did the heavy lifting of forming new solutions, representing them in code, and compiling them to something a computer understands, the code itself is now a load-bearing part of the software generation process.

Language models require exactly the same structures, designs and signposts in software that humans do, precisely because they were trained on codebases written by and for humans . Their...