End-of-history programming

Imagine a world in which chatGPT arrives 15 earlier, in 2010. Then 3 years later, Anthropic releases Opus 4.5. In this hypothetical world, would Facebook have launched React?

Back in our 2010, most of us were still writing web apps with jQuery and Backbone.js. Anything more complicated than a todo app [#1] required a lot of custom solutions, which people enjoye going to conferences and fighting about.

Then Facebook announced React in 2013, which virtualized the DOM for good. React took state out of the HTML, much better than Angular had done. It ended the MVC wars. And brought peace to the world. (Till it gave us more things to fight about.)

Yesterday I asked Opus to write me a browser extension to enable text-to-speech on Substack. I gave Opus very simple instructions and it one-shotted the whole thing. (I am no longer surprised.)

Then I decided to take a look at the code. I opened contents.ts and fell off my chair with flashbacks of life in 2010.

A thousand lines of DOM-touching, closure-filled, event-listening, pre-jQuery code. (getElementById, my old friend, where have you been, please stay there.)

I asked for some five other features, which Opus proceeded to implement, up and down the file, like no big deal. And I accepted the changes without review.

I thought to this is what it must feel like for non-technical users to use Claude Code. They can't understand the changes; they can only check the outcome.

Perhaps soon we will all forget how to code, or be unable to understand the code that AIs are writing. (After all, when we stop reviewing code, we suspend the need for agents to write abstractions that we understand.)

If Opus had come out in 2013, there would’ve been no need for React. We would be dealing with jQuery spaghetti by asking AI to do it for us.

This abiltiy to throw AI at coding problems is freezing innovation in programming languages and frameworks. Not because AI is unable to come up with improvements over Next.js or Rust. But because there's no longer an incentive for it to do so. So instead it comes up with bespoke solutions to our individual projects.

So what is the React that we’re not inventing? And how can we get AI to invent it for us?

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Notes

1. Love how React is still listed as “New” on the website.