My daughter asked if developers used to write code by hand, but it was the follow-up question that surprised me.

My daughter Emma is 11. She's been vibe coding lately, and honestly, she's pretty good at it.

The other day she looked over my shoulder at my IDE and asked: "Dad, was there ever a time when a developer had to write each one of those characters by hand?"

I said yeah, like six months ago.

It was her follow-up that gave me pause: "But how did you know what to write?"

I had to stop and think about it, because that question — how did you know what to write — was basically the entire profession. That was the craft. That was what I spent my career getting good at.