Can a Programmer Catch Up on AI Coding in Two Weeks?

David Heinemeier Hansson says a programmer who missed the past year can catch up to the frontier in two weeks. There is no long accumulation you have to replay. Someone who spent a year hiking the Himalayas could come back and catch up in the same two weeks. Leave in October and return in April or May, and the change can feel like a century in a cryo chamber: what do you mean we are not programming the old way anymore?

The requirement is a willingness to become a different kind of practitioner, because the work is moving that fast. He also says grief is a fair response. It is not his own disposition, but a sense of loss for a world you knew and liked is a time-tested way to cope. He feels some of that sadness himself. It is a goodbye to the old world of programming, after years that, for him, amounted to this moment.