Words Are the New Bytecode

You're not a full-stack developer anymore. You're a full-stack thinker.

Inspired and partly based on the talk by Andrej Karpathy, check it out if you're interested: link

Now (maybe a while back at this point - I'm really slow at catching up with trends), we've entered an era where programming is no longer about lines in a file. It's a conversation. The cursor blinks, the prompt flies off to an LLM, the answer comes back, and now your backend just exploded into six microservices without a single command written by hand.

Andrej Karpathy calls it Software 3.0, I would call it meta-programming. It's the same idea: we've climbed one more level up the abstraction ladder. Yesterday we taught machines how to manipulate registers and today we explain tasks in plain English. Tomorrow? Hold that thought — we'll get there.

English

Lately, I've caught myself doing something weirdly consistent: when I try to explain something to a colleague, I don't open an IDE or diagram tool — I wave my hands and talk. A lot. My fingers rarely leave the keyboard, but my voice has become the main solution communicator.

I feel the same thing in a system design interview. Generally, if you want to land the job you need to talk your way through the problem more than actually build something. And the more clearly you talk, the more "senior" you appear.

Is it weird? Not really, because code is no longer the main artifact. What you say — how you model ideas, trade off design options, and express intent — has become just as important as what you build the thing. The keyboard isn't where the engineering happens, and actually, it never was.