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A coder on the waning days of the craft.

- JAMES SOMERS

I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential, and ever more so by the day, encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world.

I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer, while working on a small hobby project. A few months back, my friend Ben and I had resolved to create a Times-style crossword puzzle entirely by computer. In 2018, we’d made a Saturday puzzle with the help of software and were surprised by how little we contributed— just applying our taste here and there. Now we would attempt to build a crossword-making program that didn’t require a human touch.

When we’ve taken on projects like this in the past, they’ve had both a hardware component and a software component, with Ben’s strengths running toward the former. We once made a neon sign that would glow when the subway was approaching the stop near our apartments. Ben bent the glass and wired up the transformer’s circuit board. I wrote code to process the transit data. Ben has some professional coding experience of his own, but it was brief, shallow, and now about twenty years out of date; the serious coding was left to me. For the new crossword project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. He’d signed up for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.