January 6, 2026
Nostalgia vs bots: ding ding
What *is* code? (2015)
2015’s code epic is back—and the comments are chaos
TLDR: Paul Ford’s 2015 deep dive on how software shapes business resurfaced and set off a nostalgia storm. Commenters split between celebrating human-crafted writing and lamenting that artificial intelligence now dominates, with bots, memes, and a heartfelt outback story turning a tech article into a culture clash.
The internet just dusted off Paul Ford’s 2015 mega-essay “What Is Code?”—the one with the taupe blazer guy and the never-ending meeting—and the comments turned into a full-on feelings festival. One fan called it a masterpiece and even made a bot to tweet the lines every hour (@whatiscode), while another cheered it as a rare break from today’s AI slop. In classic librarian mode, dang dropped receipts with links to past threads from 2018 and 2022, proving this piece basically lives rent-free in tech’s brain.
But the biggest drama? Nostalgia vs. the AI era. One commenter sighed that this reads like a bygone era, saying “Nobody chants ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!’ anymore,” because everything is dominated by artificial intelligence—LLMs (large language models, AKA text-guessing bots) running squads of agents. Cue pushback from the writers-and-coders crowd who miss the human voice. Meanwhile, a surprise tear-jerker dropped: a reader hitchhiked across the Australian outback when this published and felt less alone after reading it. Jokes about “Who wears a taupe blazer?” mixed with memes about “we’ve outgrown WordPress” and spaghetti code. This thread wasn’t just about code—it was about whether joy in building things survived the bot takeover, with nostalgia throwing the first punch and AI swagger clapping back.
Key Points
- •Bloomberg Businessweek devoted a single June 11, 2015 issue to Paul Ford’s explainer on code and developer culture.
- •Josh Tyrangiel’s introduction emphasizes software’s ubiquity and the necessity of understanding code.
- •The narrative depicts a manager confronting opaque, costly software initiatives that recur and expand over time.
- •A website re-architecture is proposed due to reaching limits with WordPress and outdated third-party services.
- •A leadership change (new CTO from Adobe) leads to deeming legacy code “spaghetti” and calling for full replacement.