Programming culture shifted from valuing craft and learning to treating code as a disposable means to an end. What it feels like to lose a social identity you built your career around.
The programmer identity used to be about mastering a craft - learning type systems, language design, software maintenance, and yes, even bike-shedding syntax. It was about accumulating wizard-like powers through understanding computational truths. That culture has evaporated in roughly three years, replaced by one that treats programming as an unwanted chore to automate away or a tool for building surveillance capitalism faster.
The author describes a specific kind of grief: realizing you no longer share values with the group that defined a major part of your identity. When programming forums stop discussing the merits of abstractions and start celebrating shortcuts that bypass learning entirely, when the culture shifts from "lazy programmer" meaning elegant solutions to pulling slot machine levers for boilerplate generation, you're watching your community become something else. The comparison to machine code programmers refusing compiled languages doesn't hold - this isn't about resisting better abstractions, it's about rejecting the premise that understanding how things work is now optional.
The most striking admission: for the first time, the author feels wary meeting other programmers, unsure if they'll share any common values or morality. That's not about gatekeeping - it's about recognizing when a professional identity has been hollowed out by people weaponizing fear to sell the output of coal-fired GPUs back to society. The solution isn't to stop programming or sharing knowledge. It's leaning into other identities while continuing to create for the next generation who will rediscover that building and learning are fundamentally human drives, not obsolete practices.
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