A game developer writes an obituary for programming, the puzzle AI agents now solve

An obituary written by a programmer

Jeremy Scheff, a self-employed independent video game developer best known for the basketball management game Basketball GM, published an essay on his blog on 8 October called "My obituary for programming" ¹. Before making games he worked as a mathematical biologist ³.

He writes that he was slow to start using AI coding agents, programs built on large language models (LLMs) that can write and change code on their own. He likes programming, and his business was having one of its best years, so he saw no reason to stop doing it himself ¹.

What happened when he tried

When he did try an agent, he found it could find and fix a bug from a single bug report, make his code run two or three times faster, and carry out a large reorganisation of his code that he had put off for years ¹. That left him asking whether his own work had mattered.

Scheff describes programming as a puzzle limited only by imagination, and as a job that paid people to solve "tricky little logic puzzles" ¹. Programmers, he writes, used to set the strategy, the timeline and what was possible. Working through an agent, he says, feels more like gaining abilities without truly understanding them, and he finds himself reaching for the agent before his text editor .

Simon Willison's view

On 19 October the developer and writer Simon Willison linked the essay on his own blog, saying that it captures the key loss coding agents cause for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code ². Willison added his own view: for programmers who care mostly about building working systems, LLMs keep on giving, while for those who most enjoyed solving the problems themselves, the loss is real .

The essay is one developer's personal account, not a study of how programmers in general feel.

Corrections and updates

• Corrected on 20 October 2026. An earlier version of this story called Jeremy Scheff a technology journalist; he is an independent video game developer. It also presented as Scheff's words a sentence that Simon Willison wrote when he shared the essay, and it did not list Scheff's own essay as a source. These have been corrected, and the essay and Scheff's own page are now among the sources.
• Corrected on 20 October 2026. The headline said that programmers mourn the end of coding. The story is about one developer's essay, which Simon Willison shared, not about programmers in general, and the headline now says so.

Key facts

• Jeremy Scheff, an independent game developer known for Basketball GM, published "My obituary for programming" on 8 October 2026
• He describes an AI coding agent fixing bugs, speeding up his code and doing a long-delayed reorganisation
• He says programming used to be paid puzzle-solving, and asks whether work done with little effort still matters
• Simon Willison shared the essay on 19 October and said the loss is real for programmers who enjoyed the puzzle itself

Sources

1. My obituary for programming, by Jeremy Scheff
2. My obituary for programming, linked by Simon Willison
3. About Me, by Jeremy Scheff