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I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
(www.jamesdrandall.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Programming
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I feel like they kind of lost the thread here, even though I think I agree with the idea that vibe coding is a fundamentally different thing than another layer of abstraction. There's no need to punch on the web developers. We've all known, for the last several decades at least, that we don't have to understand the entire mechanism completely. No one is out there doping their own silicon and writing JS apps to run on it. The whole point of layered abstractions is that you can build on a set of assumptions without having to know all the implementation details of the layers below. When an abstraction leaks, then it can be useful to have some facility with the lower levels, but no person alive is a master of the full stack. The beautiful thing about abstractions is that you don't have to be. That's still true with vibe coding, just with the extra complexity of having a ticker tape spitting out semi-coherent code faster than any human could type it, which moves the dev from a creative role to more of an administrative one, as they mention earlier in the piece, which 1) is not nearly as fun, and crucially 2) doesn't help you build the muscles that make one good at code administration.
Ahem. Right. That would be silly. No one would do that.
(Quick, I'll change the subject!)
I'll...uh... So Rust sure looks nice. Nothing silly going on there.
(Joking aside, I've really never done that. I can't claim I've never done anything similarly silly and wasteful. But I haven't done that, anyway.)
(Edit: yet.)
As I typed it I felt in my bones that someone was going to come along with an example of someone doing exactly that. I kinda hope someone does, I've looked into homegrown silicon and it looks... very difficult and expensive.
You think people writing C(++) for baremetal systems don't understand how their hardware works?
I don't think it's a binary switch between "understanding" and "not understanding". I have the basic gist of how semiconductors and logic gates work, I know a little about how CPUs and assembly work, and I can work with assembly if I have to, but those aren't my areas of expertise. I know enough about floating point arithmetic that I can identify floating point errors as floating point errors, but I don't claim to have anything close to the fluency in those systems that I do for higher-level languages. The ability to specialize makes it possible to make fantastic machines like the global Internet even though no one person on earth understands all the sub-components to the degree that a specialist in a particular sub-component does. I'm not saying that there aren't some computing systems that are fully comprehended by a single person, but the ability to specialize increases the scope of what is collectively possible.
OK, but that doesn't really answer my question, and I'm getting the sense you don't know how deeply some engineers understand how the hardware works. Plenty of embedded programmers have EE degrees, and can write VHDL just as well (or just as badly) as they can write C and ASM.
To answer your question: no, I don't think that. I know there are some areas of computing where having a deep understanding of the entire system is critical, like embedded systems. I mean, that necessity of deep understanding doesn't have to apply to every domain of computing, and creating abstractions is a useful way of dividing the work so we can make more complicated systems than one person could if they needed to understand every part.
A "EE" degree won't get you into poking the right things into memory using BASIC. How about your "EE" programmers try that understanding of hardware?
BASIC? That's cute.
If you don't think EE students learn how circuits (including ICs) work, what exactly do you think they're doing while they're in school?