For as long as I’ve been writing code, it’s been both a medium and a wall. Syntax, indentation, semicolons, imports, frameworks-every tiny detail demanded attention, and every missed detail broke the spell. The machine was unforgiving. If you didn’t speak its language perfectly, it didn’t just misunderstand you; it refused to understand you at all.

That rigidity shaped us. We trained ourselves to obsess over minutiae. We learned to think like compilers, not like collaborators. And while there’s beauty in that discipline, there’s also a cost: the real work - figuring out what we want to build, why it matters, and how it should behave - was always forced to share mental space with “why isn’t this semicolon in the right place?”

Now, things are shifting. AI is breaking that wall.

We’re entering an era where code is less about ritual syntax and more about clarity of thought. It’s no longer about whether I remember the exact function signature; it’s about whether I can explain the function’s purpose, its constraints, and its relationships in a way that makes sense. The bottleneck is no longer keystrokes - it’s communication.

This doesn’t mean coding disappears. It means coding stops being a gatekeeper skill. The barrier is lowering, and what stands out now isn’t the ability to memorize APIs, but the ability to articulate context. To say:

“This system should handle bursts of traffic without falling over.”
“This tool should empower the user, not box them in.”
“This algorithm should be transparent enough to explain to a non-technical person.”

The work is shifting from syntax mastery to specification mastery. From “do I know this library?” to “do I know what I want, and can I explain it well enough to get it built?”

That’s liberating, but it’s also exposing. Because now the question isn’t can you code? - it’s can you think clearly? can you communicate? can you imagine? Code used to be a barrier that made technologists feel powerful. AI is dissolving that barrier, and in the process, it’s forcing us to rediscover the real skills that were always underneath.

We don’t get to hide behind syntax anymore. We have to show our ideas.