Josh Wills has shipped code you ran today: Google's ad auction, Slack, and now the data pipelines that train foundation models at Datology. He also barely touches a keyboard anymore.
His argument is that this is fine, because writing code was never the job. Understanding the problem was, and review is how a senior engineer proves it. We work through where taste comes from when nobody writes first drafts, why agent-written pipelines run correctly at forty times the cost, why mathematicians are now going through the grief programmers went through a year ago, and whether software will ever get its AlphaZero moment: an engine that teaches us something new about how to build a database, rather than a very fast slot machine trained on ourselves.
Also: chess bots that finally feel human, the beer emulator, and why typos are now proof of work.
Chapters 00:03:59 — Josh's daily practice, and the week it clicked
00:13:37 — Review was always the job
00:18:16 — Math's turn: proofs that work but aren't beautiful
00:24:48 — Agent-written pipelines: correct, and comically expensive
00:35:07 — Chess bots that feel human
01:01:20 — Is there a Stockfish for software?
01:13:08 — Prose as proof of work
01:16:33 — Paid to understand problems
After Coding is hosted by Keith Adams of Pebblebed.
What is After Coding - A podcast by Pebblebed?
Daddy, what was vim?
For the last 80 years, the motive force of the computer revolution has been coding: the creation of software in formal languages by technical professionals exerting their intellect and their fingers. Sometime in 2025, this changed. To the extent coding remains a human activity, it is now education, craft, or leisure. The economically consequential coding is done by LLMs.
Keith Adams spent most of his waking hours coding, at VMware, Facebook, and Slack. You have run his code, probably today. He is also one of the generations of engineers whose work trained the clankers we now hand the keyboard to.
On After Coding, Keith sits down with the people who still think hardest about software to ask what the discipline becomes once the typing is no longer the point.