The Last Techno-Scribes

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, recently made an analogy that I can't stop thinking about. In a talk on YouTube, he compared the invention of AI to the invention of the printing press. His point: the printing press didn't just make books cheaper. It made literacy possible. And literacy didn't just let people read existing books — it unleashed novels, newspapers, scientific journals, political pamphlets, love letters, constitutions. Things no scribe ever dreamed of while hunched over a manuscript in a monastery.

AI, Cherny argues, is doing the same thing for programming. It's not just making coding faster. It's making coding literate — accessible to people who never learned the syntax, never debugged a segfault, never lost a weekend to a missing semicolon. And just like literacy, once everyone has it, the things they build will be unimaginable to us.

It's a beautiful analogy. It also implies something Cherny didn't dwell on: most of the scribes lost their jobs.

Twenty-Eight Years of Copying Manuscripts

I've been programming since the summer of 1997. I've shipped games professionally. I've written engines, tools, gameplay systems. I've done the Ludum Dares, the game jams, the side projects, the startups. Twenty-eight years of learning how to translate ideas into working code, one function at a time.

Last month I watched Claude Code prototype a game in days that would have taken me months.

I want to be clear: it was thrilling. I've never been more productive or more creative. The AI handles the grunt work — the boilerplate, the plumbing, the tedious iteration — and I get to focus on the design, the feel, the decisions that actually matter. It's like having a team of junior programmers who never sleep, never complain, and type at the speed of light.

But here's the thought I can't shake: if the AI does in days what took me months, and everyone has access to the same AI... why does anyone need to pay me?

What Actually Happened to the Scribes

We romanticize the printing press. We talk about Gutenberg and the democratization of knowledge and the birth of the modern world. We don't talk much about the scribes.

Before the printing press, scribes were essential. They were the only way to reproduce text. Monasteries employed them by the dozen. They were skilled, respected, and necessary. A good scribe was an artist — beautiful handwriting, meticulous attention to detail, years of training.

Then Gutenberg's press made one machine do the work of fifty scribes. And it did it faster, cheaper, and more consistently.

Some scribes adapted. They became editors, typesetters, proofreaders, teachers of the newly literate masses. They found adjacent skills that the new technology needed. But let's be honest about the history: most scribes just... stopped being scribes. The profession didn't pivot. It ended. The transition wasn't managed or gentle. It was a slow displacement that played out over decades, and the scribes who couldn't find new work didn't get a severance package from the Renaissance.

We don't know as much about this transition as I wish we did. The scribes didn't leave a lot of memoirs about losing their livelihoods. History was too busy celebrating what came next.

Three Fears

I see three things happening simultaneously, and any one of them would be enough to keep me up at night.

First: the superpower becomes universal. Right now, being a programmer who can wield AI effectively is a massive advantage. I can build things faster than I ever could before. But this advantage has a half-life. The tools are getting easier. The interfaces are getting simpler. The day is coming when "can use AI to build software" is as unremarkable as "can use Google to find information." When everyone has the superpower, it stops being a superpower. It's just literacy.

Second: studios need fewer people. If one programmer with AI can do the work of five, studios don't hire five. They hire one. Maybe two, because they like redundancy. This isn't speculation — it's basic economics. The same force that makes me more productive makes most of my colleagues redundant. Every time I marvel at how much Claude Code accelerates my work, I'm also writing the business case for my own downsizing.

Third: the flood. When anyone can make a game, everyone will. The App Store already has more games than any human could play in a lifetime. Now imagine that supply multiplied by a hundred. A thousand. The market doesn't grow to absorb infinite supply. Prices crash. Discoverability becomes impossible. The economics of selling a game — already brutal for indie developers — could collapse entirely under the weight of AI-generated content.

All three of these could happen at the same time. I think they will.

The Beautiful Flipside

Here's the part that makes this so emotionally complicated: I genuinely believe the world will be better for it.

There are people right now with incredible game design instincts who will never ship a game because they can't code. Artists with visions for interactive experiences who can't get past the technical barrier. Kids with ideas that would blow our minds if they could just build the thing.

The printing press gave us novelists. Before it, the idea of a single person writing a long-form narrative for mass consumption was absurd. Who would copy it? Who would distribute it? The economics didn't work. After the press, we got Cervantes (Don Quixote), Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment), Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings). People whose gift was storytelling, not calligraphy.

AI is going to give us the equivalent for games. People whose gift is game design, not C++ memory management. People who understand fun and flow and emotion and surprise, who can now realize their visions without spending a decade learning to program first. The games they make will be wonderful. The apps they build will solve problems we haven't thought of yet.

I'm excited for that world. I just don't know where I fit in it.

What's the Novelist?

After the printing press killed the scribes, a new profession emerged: the writer. Not someone who copied words, but someone who chose them. The skill shifted from reproduction to creation, from craft to art.

So what's the programmer equivalent? What's our "novelist"?

I think it's the person who knows what's worth building. Not the person who writes the code, but the person who understands the problem deeply enough to direct the AI toward the right solution. The game designer who can describe the feel of a jump mechanic so precisely that the AI implements it correctly. The systems thinker who understands why this database schema will cause problems at scale, even if they never write a SQL query again.

Maybe it's the person who does what I've been doing with Claude Code — not typing code, but directing creation. Playtesting, iterating, making judgment calls about what works and what doesn't. Less like a programmer, more like a film director who doesn't operate the camera but absolutely determines what ends up on screen.

That sounds nice in theory. But I'm not naive enough to think there's a clean one-to-one transition waiting for every displaced programmer. The printing press needed far fewer novelists than it displaced scribes. And it took generations for the new creative economy to fully emerge. The scribes who lived through the transition didn't get to skip ahead to the part where everything worked out.

Living in the Transition

I don't have a tidy ending for this. I'm writing it from inside the earthquake.

I know that AI is making me more creative and productive than I've ever been. I know that the games and tools being built with AI assistance are going to be extraordinary. I know that the democratization of software creation is, on balance, a magnificent thing for humanity.

I also know that I've spent twenty-eight years building a skill that is rapidly becoming a commodity. That the market I've sold my labor in for my entire adult life is about to be flooded. That the honest answer to "what should programmers do?" might be "the same thing the scribes did" — and that history doesn't record what that was, because for most of them, the answer wasn't inspiring.

The printing press was a net good for civilization. It was also a personal catastrophe for the people whose livelihoods depended on the old way of doing things. Both of those statements are true. They don't cancel each other out.

I'm a techno-scribe who can see the printing press rolling off the line. The pages it produces are beautiful. The books it will enable are beyond anything I can imagine. And I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to do next.

Maybe that's the most honest thing I can say.