Learning to program used to be like learning to play the saxophone.
You want to make beautiful sounds. But with a reed instrument, even making your first note requires practice and mouth-strength. It might be a day's work before you can get anything other than squeaks and hisses out of your instrument. Weeks before it reliably sounds decent. The learning curve is punishing upfront - massive investment for zero output.
THE SAXOPHONE LEARNING CURVE Payoff ^ | / (Music) | / | / |__________________/ | (Squeaking) +-------------------------> Time practicing
Programming was the same. You want to make cool and useful stuff. But first: environment setup, Stack Overflow, arcane decisions, syntax, regret about life choices, terminal commands. It might be hours before you first get to "hello world" and weeks before you get anything useful.
THE OLD PROGRAMMING LEARNING CURVE Payoff ^ | / (Utility) | / | / |__________________/ | (Syntax & Config) +-------------------------> Time
Language models changed the shape of the curve. Now you can describe what you want and get working code instantly. Not perfect, clean, production code - but perfectly serviceable, interactive prototype, proof-of-concept kind of code. Instantly recognizable music.
THE AI PROGRAMMING LEARNING CURVE Payoff ^ | .......... (The Last Mile Slog) | _ / | _ / | _/ (Utility) | / |/ (Instant prototype) | +-------------------------> Time
It's fucking fun.
This isn't to say "AI makes programming easy." There is still a learning curve. You still need to understand what you're building. There's still great art and science required to build successful product.
But the transactional order is different. You get utility (a working tool) before you pay the full cost (fluency).
It's a reduction in time to first payoff. When first payoff comes after months of investment, only the highly motivated push through. When payoff comes immediately, more people get paid, and thus stick with it, and thus climb the curve.
In 1957, FORTRAN - the first widely-used high-level language - let scientists write programs without learning machine code first. It "enlarged the user base by a factor of ten, at least."1 I think we're seeing the same pattern here. When you collapse the upfront cost of a valuable tool, you explode the number of people using it. A lot more people are becoming programmers.
2025-12-18
1 Fernando Corbató, quoted in M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (2001), pp. 169-170. ↩