The Tao of Programming predicted the age of AI coding — and it did it by accident

Geoffrey James wrote a satirical manual about programmers and their managers decades ago. Dry, deadpan, fortune-cookie sentences.

Read now through the lens of agentic coding, and it takes on a different meaning.

The Tao warned us: complex systems resist rigid control; programs succeed by accident; the people issuing instructions rarely understand the work they manage.

Sound familiar? Today, the developer is often the manager, and the AI agent is the coder — the roles have quietly rotated.

What the Tao couldn’t foresee is that the entity writing the code now has no skin in the game: no intent, no pride, no 2 a.m. indignation about an edge case.

That absence isn’t a bug in the old philosophy; it’s a new reality we need to design for — one that assumes the coder has no ownership.

Re-read the Tao. It’s a warning and a guidebook, if we learn to read it for the century of agents.