Much of the current excitement around AI coding rests on convenient fiction: that machines have only just begun doing programmersā work. They have been doing it for more than 80 years. Generative AI is just the latest and most visible chapter in that long history of programming automation.
In the 1940s, programmers worked close to the hardware, entering numeric instructions and managing memory addresses directly. Assembly language changed that relationship. Developers could write symbolic names instead of raw numbers, and an assembler translated them into machine instructions. It remained machine-specific, but part of the translation had moved from the programmer to software.
Compilers extended that idea from individual instructions to entire programs. Formula Translation (Fortran), introduced in the 1950s, let scientists and engineers describe
