I still remember the first website I ever made from scratch: the cumulation of a month’s effort to save and analyze all the blog posts of my freshman class in high school. It was just one 1k-line javascript file, one HTML file, and one CSS file. No fancy SSR, server actions, BFFs, JIT compiling, IaC, or, god forbid, Tailwind. Just heaps of global javascript `vars` and function call stacks that could make you cry. Imagine! The only external library was, actually, JQuery. And the backend data scraping script was written in Java, only because I had discovered competitive programming months before and Java was the new hot thing. But it worked, and you could see information that wasn’t there before, aggregated and arranged in ways that had only been in my mind days prior. It was the first time I found myself really invested in something. It was magic at my fingertips.

We can rewind even further. I remember back in middle school, when “hacking” sites with Inspect Element was all the rage. I didn’t even really know HTML at the time, but I knew that if you clicked on the right places in the Inspect panel, you could fool literally everyone in the class.

The magic and malleability of software that I’ve discovered through my first programs have compelled me to stick with software development in the years since. It has compelled me to apply for and study computer science at CMU. It has compelled me to make many more projects since then, searching for both the technically challenging and the visually appealing. It has also compelled me to become a weeb.

I do fear for what software development looks like in the future, though, when LLMs have stolen codebase ownership and the right to write code by hand. When LLMs have massacred both the pristinely maintained codespaces and the coding landscape as a whole in favor of speed and cost-cutting and the ever-clichéd presence of corporate greed.

Perhaps we are witnessing the death of coding as we know it. I’m glad to have lived through its last light, though. Its magic will never leave me.