It's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future. We have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL, that about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply. I don't think any of the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the 70s had any damn idea that in 2025, checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then.

But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do? You're not going to be able to predict the future. No one's going to be able to predict the future. If you like programming, you should learn programming. Now, is that going to be a career forever?

I don't know. But what's going to be a career forever? Who knows? Like a second ago, we thought that it was the blue collar labor that was going to be extracted first. It was the robots that were going to take over. Then Gen AI comes out and then all the artists suddenly look like, holy shit, is this going to do all animation now?

It's going to do all music now? They get real scared. And now I see the latest Tesla robot going like, oh, maybe we're back now to blue collar being in trouble because if it can dance like that, it can probably fix that toilet. So no one knows anything. And you have to then position yourself for the future in such a way that it doesn't matter that you pick a profession or path where if it turns out that you have to retool and reskill, you're not going to regret the path you took.

That's a general life principle for me. I want to be content with all outcomes. If no one wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code, to explore greenfield domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it.

What a blessing. What a privilege. If a bunch of people want it, that's great. We can pay some salaries. We can keep the business running. And if it's a blow away success, wonderful. I get to impact a bunch of people. Thank you for watching this clip. Please subscribe to the Lex Friedman YouTube channel and consider watching the full episode of the podcast.