I just had a full-circle moment, and I need to write it down before it fades.
Back in the early 2000s, I learned to code in school in Nepal.
We wrote QBasic scripts by hand.
In a notebook. With a pen.
No way to run it. No way to know if it worked. No red squiggly line telling you that you forgot a semicolon.
You just wrote the logic and hoped your brain compiled it correctly.
Then came Notepad.
Then a “real” code editor.
Then a full IDE with autocomplete does half the thinking for me.
Each jump felt huge at the time.
Like, “wow, I can’t believe I used to work without this.”
And today? I don’t even type the code anymore.
I just… talk. I say what I want, and the AI writes it.
Think about that gap and jump for a second.
2000s to 2026
Same brain. Same guy. Just a completely different relationship with the machine.
I’m not saying this to be dramatic about AI (everyone’s already doing that). I’m saying it because I actually lived through every single step of this ladder, and most people entering tech today will never know what it felt like to write code with no idea if it’ll run.
It’s wild.
I went from hoping my logic was right on paper to just describing what I want out loud.
What a journey!
😀
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