written on July 20, 2025
This post is addressed to the Python community, one I am glad to be a member of.
I'm product of my community. A decade ago I wrote about how much I owed the Python community. Recently I found myself reminiscing again. This year at EuroPython I even gave a brief lightning talk recalling my time in the community — it made me tear up a little.
There were two reasons for this trip down memory lane. First, I had the opportunity to be part of the new Python documentary, which brought back a flood of memories (good and bad). Second, I've found myself accidentally pulled towards agentic coding and vibe coders1. Over the last month and a half I have spoken with so many people on AI and programming and realized that a growing number of them are people I might not, in the past, have described as “programmers.” Even on the way to the conference I had the pleasure to engage in a multi-hour discussion on the train with an air traffic controller who ventured into programming because of ChatGPT to make his life easier.
I'm not sure where I first heard it, but I like the idea that you are what you do. If you're painting (even your very first painting) you are a painter. Consequently if you create a program, by hand or with the aid of an agent, you are a programmer. Many people become programmers essentially overnight by picking up one of these tools.
Heading to EuroPython this year I worried that the community that shaped me might not be receptive to AI and agentic programming. Some of that fear felt warranted: over the last year I saw a number of dismissive posts in my circles about using AI for programming. Yet I have also come to realize that acceptance of AI has shifted significantly. More importantly there is pretty wide support of the notion that newcomers will and should be writing AI-generated code.
That matters, because my view is that AI will not lead to fewer programmers. In fact, the opposite seems likely. AI will bring more people into programming than anything else we have done in the last decade.
For the Python community in particular, this is a moment to reflect. Python has demonstrated its inclusivity repeatedly — think of how many people have become successful software engineers through outreach programs (like PyLadies) and community support. I myself can credit much of my early carreer from learning from others on the Python IRC channels.
We need to pay close attention to vibe coding. And that not because it might produce lower‑quality code, but because if we don't intentionally welcome the next generation learning through these tools, they will miss out on important lessons many of us learned the hard way. It would be a mistake to treat them as outcasts or “not real” programmers. Remember that many of our first programs did not have functions, were a mess of GOTO and things copy/pasted together.
Every day someone becomes a programmer because they figured out how to make ChatGPT build something. Lucky for us: in many of those cases the AI picks Python. We should treat this as an opportunity and anticipate an expansion in the kinds of people who might want to attend a Python conference. Yet many of these new programmers are not even aware that programming communities and conferences exist. It’s in the Python community’s interest to find ways to pull them in.
Consider this: I can name the person who brought me into Python. But if you were brought in via ChatGPT or a programming agent, there may be no human there — just the AI. That lack of human connection is, I think, the biggest downside. So we will need to compensate: to reach out, to mentor, to create on‑ramps. To instil the idea that you should be looking for a community, because the AI won't do that. We need to turn a solitary interaction with an AI into a shared journey with a community, and to move them towards learning the important lessons about engineering. We do not want to have a generation of developers held captive by a companies building vibe-coding tools with little incentive for their users to break from those shackles.
I'm using vibe coders here as people that give in to having the machine program for them. I believe that many programmers will start in this way before they transition to more traditional software engineering.↩