There’s a scene in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo meets Seraph, the Oracle’s bodyguard. After an intense fight, Seraph stops and explains he had to be sure Neo was The One. Neo replies, "You could’ve just asked." Seraph answers: "No. You do not truly know someone until you fight them."

I used to say something similar about programmers: you don’t know them until you’ve fixed bugs in their code.

I could recognize Wayne’s code by the way his APIs always allocated memory and returned pointers to internal structures. I could recognize Andrew’s by the way he juggled six different pointers and wove them together in ways that made ordinary brains explode.

I worry that with modern tools we’re losing some of those quirks—how programmers name things, shape data structures, reveal their blind spots, or express their taste in APIs.

I’m sure when compilers eliminated the need to handwrite assembly, programmers like Mel—the archetypal "real programmer"—lamented the loss of the same kinds of signatures. Automation always sands off a little individuality. Something closer to art than engineering disappears.

People who lament AI coding tools probably lean toward the artisan side of the craft.

With my engineering hat on, I don’t care what code looks like as long as it satisfies certain properties: correctness, maintainability, performance.

With my artisan hat on, I care about the fingerprints—the small hints of the human who wrote it.

Something does get lost in automation.

And yet progress marches on.