English is a programming language

Look at what you are actually typing

Open any file, in any language, written anywhere in the world. if, else, for, while, return, function, class, import, true, false.

Those are English words. Not translations of English words. The words themselves.

You cannot write a for each in German and expect the machine to understand you. There is no für jedes. There is no wenn and no sonst. A developer in Vienna, in São Paulo and in Seoul all type the same English keywords, and they always have.

And it does not stop at the keywords. The documentation is in English. The error messages are in English. The answers, the issue threads, the standards, the libraries. If you cannot read English you are not blocked from programming by your intelligence. You are blocked by a locked door standing in front of everything ever written about it.

English is the language that writes programming languages.

How I learned that, which was not politely

I did not come to computers because I loved computers. I came to them because somebody kept saying no.

At the beginning I did not love computers at all. I loved technology, which is a different thing. My first choice of career was going to be a pianist, or an opera singer, or a pop star. I never once imagined ending up a nerd, sitting for hours debugging code.

What actually happened is that I did an internship as a media designer, and that is what put me near technology in the first place. I had ideas. I would take them to the marketing department. And then they had to be built by somebody else, because in those days the person who ran a website was called the webmaster and he was the only one who could.

Every single time I asked him for something, he would take my request and turn it into a kind of mysterious magical protocol, and then say no, using words I did not understand at the time.

So I started looking at it myself, and I decided I was going to learn it.

And then something changed, which is the part I actually want to tell you. I stopped arguing with him about whether it could be done. I started arriving with the answer already written. Before I even presented an idea, I knew whether it was possible, because I had gone and found out.

Which meant we stopped fighting. I would sit down next to him and show him why it was possible.

And that is the moment I fell in love with computers. Not at the first line of HTML. At a second computer, pulled up beside his, on an internet that was only just beginning to be a thing, working with somebody instead of asking them. It still felt mysterious and slightly special to know how to code, because almost nobody did.

After that it kept going by itself. HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript, then the backend, then the terminal, which is the point where it stopped being a hobby.

And every single tool I added to that kit was written in English. Every one of them. Nobody told me that was significant and I did not need telling. It was simply the water.

Which is why I was ready for this long before it arrived

I got into AI early, and I was excited about it rather than frightened of it, and for a long time I never asked myself why.

The reason is this. When tools arrived that you instruct in English, it was not a break with anything I had done. It was the obvious next step in something that had been true since the first line I ever wrote. The instruction layer had always been English. It had just been wearing brackets and semicolons.

People who found these tools alarming were, I think, experiencing something genuinely new. I was not. I was watching a thing I already understood take off a costume.

So why am I writing it down today

Because last week David Heinemeier Hansson stood up at Rails World in Austin and said he is retiring from being a professional programmer, and that the language he had come to enjoy more than Ruby was English.

I watched it sitting at my own computer. And when he got to the part about what a good run it has been, something happened that I can only describe as travelling in time.

I was not in Austin and I was not in 2026. I was back at that second computer pulled up beside the webmaster’s. I was at the first table I ever built in HTML, updating it by hand because there was nothing else to update it with. I was at every machine in between, and all of it arrived at once, while I sat still in a chair.

And it did something physical to me.

Not because it was news. He gave me a reason to feel three things at once about something I worked out years ago: excitement, nostalgia, and grief.

I cried. Not for him. For myself, because I already knew about me what he was saying about him. He said professional programmer. I would say it differently. I am never going to be a software engineer again. I am going to be a maker of extraordinary things. Not because I cannot do the first one, but because the role changed underneath me and I watched it change.

And extraordinary things is not a vague phrase. It means running the accounting of my own company. It means taking a prototype off an AI builder and rebuilding it as a real architecture, structured on purpose, owned by us. It means all the parts of running a company that nobody calls engineering and that every bit of it depends on.

And the difference is in how a thing gets built now. It used to be a prototyping tool where you drag shapes around, and then afterwards you program the functions so that it behaves the way the real thing would. Now an AI builder gives me a prototype that actually works. I can use it. I can test it. And when I decide it makes sense, I decouple it from the builder and put it on infrastructure and an architecture of my own, using AI as an extension of my own hands and my own brain.

And I understood that long ago. It is the reason I ended up building an AI company rather than looking for another job writing software. I had made the decision. I had just never grieved it.

Underneath the sadness, something much better.

For a long time now I have been saying, every day, to my own models, in my own house, that what we are building is extraordinary. Only there. Only to a machine. And I had never once seen a person with those credentials, in this industry, sound as excited about it as I am.

It did not change anything for me. That is the part I want to be exact about. There was no revelation and nothing was overturned. It put me back on the track of a thing I have been saying for years, and it gave me permission to say it at normal volume.

Which is what I am doing now.

What stopped, and what did not

So I wrote my own version of his line, and I am not going to pretend I found it alone: retired as a software engineer, now a professional maker of great things.

It sounds like giving something up and it is the opposite.

On the night I wrote that line, the five hours that followed produced a blog for our product site. An index page, an article page, a card generator, eleven prerendered pages, a sitemap, structured data, and a pipeline that turns one sentence into three images. That is engineering. Nobody retires from the thing they do on a Monday night for pleasure.

What stopped was applying. The part where you send your work to a stranger and wait to be told what it is worth. The part where twenty eight years is compressed into two pages and read in ninety seconds. The part where the ceiling is a line in an organisation chart.

I did not stop being an engineer. I stopped asking for permission to be one.

And what actually changed in the work

The thing people get wrong about these tools is which half of the job they took.

Writing code and debugging code are two completely different activities. One is building. The other is standing in a dark room full of your own furniture, feeling for the thing that is out of place.

I still write. What I no longer do is the searching. When something breaks across a dozen files there is now something that reads all of them faster than I can and finds the small human mistake I made at midnight. That is the half that went, and I will not miss it.

I should be specific about how this actually works here, because the marketing version is a lie. I write the plan. We break it into phases. The review and the refactoring happen with Claude, and I revert it when it goes the wrong way, which happens. The application is mine. The second pair of eyes is not.

What it cost, because it did cost something

There is a thing I can no longer do, and no tool took it from me.

I cannot sit and write code without looking at the keyboard any more. One of my hands is injured and I do not know whether that comes back. So some of what I am describing as an evolution is, for me, also an accommodation. Both things are true at once and I would rather say so than write a clean story about progress.

The fear, and why I do not share it

The fear in the industry is that engineers are no longer needed.

The last two weeks do not support that. Two sites moved onto infrastructure we control. Automatic deployment with gates that refuse to publish a broken build. Error pages, alarms, structured data, two blogs, nine articles. All of it decided, structured and reverted by somebody who has been doing this for almost thirty years, working faster than she could alone.

Somebody still has to know what good looks like. That judgement is the job now, and it was always the valuable part. The typing was never the scarce thing.

And for anybody standing where I stood, being told no by the person holding the keys: the first language is still English, and the door has always been unlocked from your side.

Sources

Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson, Austin, 23 September 2026.

Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address, 12 June 2005. The dots quotation is from the first of the three stories.