Sounds like clickbait, but it's true.
Programming has never been about the act of entering code: of typing characters, moving blocks of text, saving files, and compiling. All that stuff is (or perhaps was) part of the job: nurses take temperatures, conductors wave a stick, and we wrestle code. But none of those things define the job; they're just stuff we have to do to get the real work done.
As with most complex jobs, there's no single defining activity that is programming. Sometimes we're like therapists, helping our clients come to an understanding of their problems. Sometimes we're translators, converting back and forth between the messy real world and the less forgiving world of code and hardware. Sometimes we are persuaders.
But, at the heart of software development is an incredibly important skill. We are editors. But that has nothing to do with keyboards.
Editing Is Directed Curation
Outside of software, editing means organizing and polishing something to make it ready for release. A newspaper editor collects, refines, and organizes articles. The editor for a talk show lines up interesting guests and then sets up interesting things to discuss.
Good developers have always been experts at this kind of editing. They take a bunch of vague ideas and try to arrange them in a way that makes sense. They polish and refine, swapping algorithms, rearranging modules, all to improve the final delivery. And they're not afraid to wield the red pencil, striking through whole chunks of the system that aren't carrying their weight.
And here's the cool thing. That skill was important 20 years ago, when we were churning out C++ and Java. But it is equally important today, in a world where most of the code churning is done by agents. Claude can code. But Claude doesn't have your spidey sense. AI is great at thinking locally, but not so good at keeping the big picture in focus. That's why we still need people; people who act as editors: directing, polishing, cutting, and assembling.
And that's why good programmers continue to hone their skills. They work on building a deeper and broader understanding of how code should be developed, because those skills matter whether you're punching cards, typing into VSCode, or guiding an AI.
Talking about honing skills, what have you read lately?
