Me: Wait. What’d you do? Did you create a web page?
Them: Yeah. It’s just a text file. HTML you know…

Coding clicked for me in college, when a friend showed me how to use the nano command line text editor to edit a file and save it to disk. The bare page with a classic “hello world” message was besides the point.

It made sense. Websites should be deterministic, text-based artifacts that anyone can edit with basic tools and then open in a web browser. In high school, I learned how to make websites with graphical software like Dreamweaver that abstracted away the underlying code. While I accepted the unhandy use of drag-and-drop to rearrange visual elements and Ctrl-Z to undo mistakes, I also wondered how the people who made the tools were able to work without making a mess. I moused around to create a beautiful chocolate-themed personal website with heavy use of CSS border-style: inset.

Text editors were revolutionary. It required more thinking and planning, but the control was amazing - if the text was the same, then the website would be exactly the same. Color codes were more precise than color wheels or swatches; pixel specifications didn’t demand a steady hand finessing cursors. Mathematical styling patterns provided a sense of proportion and rigor over tongue eyeballing. This way felt ergonomic.

That pivotal moment came to mind at work recently when I decided to use AI to produce an executive summary of a project plan as a HTML file.

The experiment took 5 minutes with minimal instruction, and the result was a stochastic surprise. AI generated a nice web page that laid out the project plan, its milestones, and key tasks. It was easy to filter and sort the information, and the design was slick. A PDF version was created as a familiar and clutch alternative to the .html file extension. The correct code looked like a jungle compared to the simple HTML file my friend made back in college and manual changes would be tedious, but AI could update it without difficulty.

Dreamweaver, improved! AI is the abstraction layer on steroids, supreme in the league of calculators and engines, and the GOAT of tooling. To write a bug-free program is to build character line by line. Yet someday this labor will appear to children as a historical curiosity, not unlike the grim necessity of felling local wood to repair a wagon axle mid-journey across raw land at the onset of winter.

It’s still cool to learn how to do things, both new and old, and share them. Personal websites harden the spirit. Skipping the chocolate this time, too.