One Kilobyte to Copilot: My journey through programming history
I coded my first program when a single kilobyte was considered luxurious memory.
Now, I want to reminisce about the “good” old days, reflecting on where and how programming has progressed over the decades. And by “good,” I mean objectively terrible in almost every measurable way. Terrible, yes, but paradoxically valuable: what didn’t kill you made you better. Having survived, I am all the better.
I did not just adapt to the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see an IDE until I was already a man.
My first code was on a Sinclair ZX81 in BASIC. Early 80s. Yes, I am aging myself. Remember those? That tiny British computer with its membrane keyboard and 1KB of memory. ONE KILOBYTE. You kids, with your gigabytes of RAM, you have absolutely no idea. I’d spend hours typing in programs only to lose them when I accidentally kicked the power cable. That was programming in its most primal form: coding with a side order of prayer.
But my education in digital masochism didn’t stop with home computers. As I graduated high school, I graduated to new levels of programming purgatory. Try writing Fortran on an IBM 360 using an offline terminal with 8-inch disks. Not punchcards, mind you — I narrowly escaped that particular circle of programmer hell, though I’ve held those ancient artifacts in my hands. The 8-inch disks were the ‘modern’ alternative. You’d meticulously code your program on an off-line terminal, turn the disc into the computer center, and then… wait. A full day of anxious anticipation only to get your printout back with ‘SYNTAX ERROR LINE 42’ staring at you. One misplaced comma, one forgotten + in the 6th column, and you’d lose another day. We measured our feedback loops in days, not milliseconds.
Then came the era of ‘user-friendly’ programming, and I use those quotation marks with all the irony they deserve. In the early days of IDEs, I remember TurboPascal with genuine affection. That blue screen felt like magic compared to the bare command lines and text editors I’d been battling. It was a miracle — instant feedback! Compile errors in seconds rather than days! But even TurboPascal was a far cry from what we call IDEs today. It was more like a fancy text editor with a ‘compile’ button strapped to its side. Still, that garish blue screen represented genuine progress, and I loved it despite its limitations.
Then grad school happened, and I was thrust back into the dark. Vi and emacs — text editors that separated the men from the boys. No training wheels, no friendly blue screens (blue screens then meant something entirely different from BSOD). This wasn’t programming with safety nets; this was bare-knuckle coding. I got good at remembering those arcane keyboard combinations. Wanted to delete a line? ‘dd’. Need to search and replace? Let me just type this small novel of command sequences. Wanted to exit VI? Hah! You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
This is where the real forging happened. Not in the comfortable confines of an IDE but in the unforgiving v2220 terminal, where every command had to be memorized, where every keystroke mattered. There were no IDEs then that could do more than basic syntax checking. Refactoring? Debugging? Integrating anything? Ha! We wrote code like medieval monks transcribing manuscripts, character by character, with only our wits to guide us.
But the technological renaissance was coming. As object-oriented programming gained momentum and corporate development became more standardized, the age of industrial-strength IDEs dawned. I migrated from different IDEs as I moved on from C++ to Java in the 90s.
Somewhere in the early 2000s, I latched on to Eclipse and became quite the master at it. I would boast that I could code without writing code: a few masterful keystrokes, escape sequences and keyboard combinations, and you have fully functioning code! What joy. After Vi’s monastic discipline, this felt like sorcery. I was no longer just writing code; I was orchestrating it, conducting symphonies of methods and classes with the flicks of my fingers. The IDE became an extension of my programming consciousness.
As I switched from Java to Python, I also switched my IDE to VSCode. This was not a significant shift but merely a stepping stone to what was to come. The wheel of technology never stops turning, and what seemed magical in the 2000s was merely the precursor to today’s revolution.
Fast forward a decade or more… now we have the AI coding agents — the Copilots that are paired with IDEs, the fine-tuned LLMs that can code well, or the new “code with AI with no code” tools such as Bolt, Replit, et al, or the hybrid approach of Cursor. What an amazing journey! From punching holes in cards to punching keys on keyboards to simply describing what we want and watching AI materialize it before our eyes.
For the last couple of months, I have been experimenting with these no-code AI platforms. I have mixed feelings. Yes, I could and did create functioning apps I’ve deployed without knowing a thing about the front end — they look professional, but digging deep into the code reveals the issues: non-optimal algorithms, bloated dependencies, security vulnerabilities hiding in plain sight, and verbose code that seems designed for machines rather than humans. It’s like a beautiful mansion with a shoddy foundation. Your immediate problems may have been solved, but when you look under the hood, you see oodles of technical debt you must deal with.
I’m currently gravitating towards tools like Cursor — where I have some semblance of control, but I also have an able partner who can do what I cannot do. It’s the happy medium between autonomy and assistance. Perhaps I can be the first-ever single-person unicorn, with me in charge of everything from architecture to user experience and my AI assistance filling in the gaps.
Looking back at my path, the evolution has been remarkable. From waiting days for a compile error message to having AI suggest entire functions before I’ve finished typing the comment. But in this brave new world of intelligent coding companions, I find myself valuing the battle-tested skills I developed in those harder times. The understanding of what happens under the hood. The appreciation for elegant, efficient solutions. The revulsion for wasted CPUs and memory.
The ZX80 kid is still alive and active inside the AI-augmented developer, ready to call bullshit on wasteful code and bloated solutions. Those valuable lessons of doing more with less are still around, waiting to spot when some fancy AI-generated algorithm uses a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
The discipline molded into us by necessity doesn’t disappear when the machines start helping. The tools may be fancier, the language models may be more intelligent, but the fundamental skill of knowing when code is just plain stupid comes from having once written programs where every byte was precious, and every CPU cycle mattered. You had to be there in the darkness, feeling your way through the code one character at a time, and emerge in the light with the hard-earned wisdom to know when to embrace AI and when to override it.
