It's a horse!

I’ve been walking for fun and profit all my life. From the exciting first hikes where everything was new and each step a small victory, to the routine daily walks that feel like errands with the occasional challenging trail or interesting detour. I often heard about some new gear that would change walking forever. It would be easier, faster, not as tiresome. New paths and shortcuts that would make popular destinations easier to reach. Most of those promised revolutionary improvements felt incremental at best. Except for shoes, but that was so long ago we barely remember the transition. The barefoot crowd kept insisting it wasn’t real walking. That crowd doesn’t exist anymore. Even the legendary Don, who describes all his specialized techniques for barefoot hiking, uses shoes when he’s out on a trail. I have to admit that there are a few rare cases where barefoot is better, but most of us won’t encounter those scenarios in our whole lives.

And then the rumors started: people saying they were able to get on a horse and it would walk for them. “No way that’s safe,” we thought collectively. We heard about all the horrible accidents. “Told you!” said the seasoned hikers loudly and gleefully, with a hint of relief. The evil beast was impossible to guide properly. Walking would always be faster.

I had to try it for myself. I had a companion dog for some time at that point. It would help me find my way along the trail, but it helped me about as often as it got lost. I learnt some tricks to help him focus, like throwing a stick to where I wanted to go and watching the dog zoom there successfully almost every time. How hard could it be to figure out how to use a horse? It was hard, tiresome, and mostly a pain in the butt. Walking was definitely faster, but this crazy beast was new and exciting!

I said I walk for a living. However, that’s not entirely true. I actually run trade routes. Walking is a large chunk of the work, but it’s probably the lowest value work. Figuring out what trades to make, which destinations to visit, and how to route efficiently is where the value is. Walking there, once you’ve walked many many trails, is just a chore. But I digress.

I started to get better at riding the quadruped, and slowly but surely it was getting easier, less painful. I learnt about saddles, reins, different riding techniques. I found myself guiding it better, nudging it successfully through every checkpoint and reaching my destination quicker while enjoying the scenery. I was convinced horses were here to stay. My horse Claudio would be with me on all my adventures as far as I could tell.

I would tell fellow hikers about my experiences. When talking to a hiker who was going through the same thing, we would immediately start sharing tricks and have a laugh about some crazy quirk we noticed in these majestic creatures.

I would tell horseless hikers about these beasts, how weird it was in the beginning, how different it was from plain walking, but how enjoyable the trails were becoming again. I heard so many dismissive rebuttals.

“Walking is faster.” Not for me. Not anymore. Not for many of my usual destinations.

“But that’s not proper hiking!” I like this better. I get to explore more routes and destinations. I venture to places that used to be too far for me to reach in a reasonable time. Things like crossing a wide, shallow river are super easy, barely an inconvenience now.

“I tried a saddled horse with reins and it wasn’t that fast, and still a pain.” Yes, you still need to learn how to ride for it to be fast and painless.

“But you have to feed and take care of the horse.” Yes, but I transport things for a living. Having a good horse pays for itself in a single day! (At the current hay prices.)

I don’t think I’m even close to taking full advantage of my horse. I’m hearing wild things about what people are achieving using horses. Carts attached to horses, using horses to guide herds of horses. Sounds crazy, but it’s probably true. I still walk sometimes, but nowadays I prefer riding.

Shoes, Dogs and Horses

I learnt to program in BASIC using an old Talent MSX around Y2K. Soon after, I was using Turbo Pascal in early high school. But it wasn’t until I was programming PIC microcontrollers in assembler, before moving to PICBASIC and C, that I really appreciated how large the productivity jump was between plain assembly and a compiled language.

By that time, it was common knowledge for software developers, but that wasn’t always the case. People complained about early compilers, about the horrible assembler those evil programs would produce, about how that wasn’t real programming. Many years later, it’s unthinkable to write plain assembly except for very niche scenarios. A compiler becoming self-hosted is a celebrated milestone.

When the ChatGPT revolution came, we immediately started to find ways to use this magic box to write code, mostly unsuccessfully. It was just a toy, and it couldn’t produce production-ready code. But the tools always get better.

Copilot was getting pretty good at guessing the next line. Writing a short comment about what I wanted made it lock in. It was great at writing repetitive unit tests, and it came up with an original edge case once in a while. It wasn’t just a toy anymore. It was a useful tool. It did hallucinate APIs and functions sometimes, but who hasn’t?

And finally, the agents came. Things moved fast from “this thing writes OK code that I have to clean up” to “I gave the agent instructions on how I want my code and it’s doing it how I like it”. It felt weird demoting the IDE to a secondary tool. I find myself using the IDE mostly to write and change specs. Software development and coding are overlapping less and less for me.

I think we are in the early compilers era regarding AI agents, but with a much stronger and faster feedback loop. The LLMs keep getting better every few months. And even if that wasn’t the case, the tools and techniques are evolving constantly.

There is a steep section at the beginning of this learning curve, but the payoff is huge. I was able to create a complete non-trivial Android app without ever writing a single line of Kotlin. The starting point was an empty directory with two markdown files, FEATURES.md and MILESTONES.md, 200 and 158 words respectively.

I can get things done in stacks I’m not proficient in. I can quickly find and fix bugs in unfamiliar codebases. I can explore and try multiple things in the background while I work on my main tasks. I get to spend more time and energy making sure I’m building the right thing before any code is written, instead of figuring it out during the implementation. I get to think more about the what and why and less about the how.

AI-assisted software development is here to stay. I’d recommend learning to ride.

P.S. I’m sure there are many people trying to figure out how to build a car. I can’t wait to see how that plays out.

P.P.S. You can learn a bit about my saddle and reins here.