In 1972, Edsger Dijkstra stood up to accept a Turing Award and gave a lecture called "The Humble Programmer." He had never seen an LLM. He had never watched an agent rewrite a file in his terminal. And yet what he said that day reads like a direct response to the way we argue about AI coding in 2026. So does a good deal of what his contemporaries wrote over the two decades that followed.
That's the strange thing about the current moment. We talk about vibe coding, generated-code trust, and "is learning to code even worth it" as if they're brand-new problems. They're old problems wearing a new model's clothes. Here are ten quotes, most of them decades old, that predicted the exact arguments we're having now. I'll give you the line, who said it, and why it lands harder in 2026 than the day it was written.
1. The whole case for AI coding, stated in 1972
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."
— Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer (ACM Turing Award Lecture, 1972)
