A few weeks ago I had Claude Code write, test, and deploy an app. Server, DNS, authentication, technical docs, all done in fifteen minutes. One shot.

Pretty amazing. But something nagged.

After fifty years of writing code myself, this stings a little. My pride has shifted: it's no longer "look what I built", it's "look how well I can prompt". I started reading through the generated code, but gave up after a dozen lines. Claude had used Python, which happens to be one of the few languages I don't speak fluently.

On my desk: Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks. Saved them for retirement. Pointless now, I thought.

In a Dutch post on LinkedIn I even muttered something about using them to start the kachel.

So I asked Claude directly: is it still worth learning programming languages? Be honest.

What I got was a reprimand.

The framing sets up a false dichotomy. You're contrasting "useful skill acquisition" with "pointless hobby" — but you never applied that test to organ playing, or Esperanto, or your homelab. Working through Advent of Code in Haskell isn't about becoming employable. It's puzzle-solving with a particular flavor of intellectual pleasure.

So read the books. The kachel can wait.

A kachel is a Dutch wood-burning stove. Those books, it was saying, were not yet kindling.

Somewhat reassured. Then I read this.

Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox and early engineer at Facebook: "We will never write code by hand again." Wonder mixed with profound sadness. Someone with ten times my track record saying exactly the same thing. That landed differently than I expected.

I forwarded it to Claude.

Agarwal's frame is professional. He's talking about code as a means to ship products. Hand-writing code to build a web app is becoming like hand-typesetting a book.

But you're retired. When you sit down with the Seven Languages books, you're not competing with AI. You're doing what a chess player does when they study openings despite Stockfish being better than any human alive. The existence of Stockfish didn't kill chess as a hobby. It killed chess as computation.

The kachel still waits.

I've picked a language: Idris. You encode mathematical proofs in the type system. Nobody uses it in production. Barely anyone uses it at all.

The comparison with Esperanto is obvious. If you've been following this site for a while, you know I mean that as a compliment.

Also posted in Dutch: The kachel can wait