Tiger Woods started playing golf when he was 2. He specialized early and eventually became one of the greatest golfers ever.
In Range, David Epstein compares it with the story of Roger Federer, who played all sorts of sports as a kid and only focused on tennis later on. And yet he eventually became one of the greatest tennis players ever. Federer’s path, Epstein argues, is actually more common among elite athletes than Tiger’s.
Epstein asks a simple question: which story is the rule, and which is the exception? It turns out it depends on the game. He then explains, borrowing two terms from the psychologist Robin Hogarth, that a kind game is one where the rules are clear, patterns repeat all the time, and feedback is fast and accurate. Golf is a kind game. Chess is the ultimate kind game.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are wicked games. When playing wicked games, Epstein argues, we often benefit from breadth more than depth. Think of litigation law, for example. It’s pretty wicked, and litigation lawyers tend to do better when they have curiosity and understand people, and whether they started memorizing laws at 4 or not is mostly irrelevant.
Claude’s sassiness
I like chess. I’m not very good at it, but I know some openings and defenses. I’m also a programmer. And, like many others, I realized back in November 2025 how Opus 4.5 was faster and better at writing code in the stack I’ve used for years.
I asked Claude about the future, about whether teams of human plus machine will be unbeatable, as I remember from Range how there were these chess championships a couple decades ago in which both humans and computers were able to participate, and centaurs, teams of a human and a computer, would usually end up winning. But then Claude reminded me that, eventually, computers started beating everybody, human or centaur.
Getting wicked
A lot of programmers are having a hard time with AI. Last week, at Rails World, the main Rails conference (Rails is a legendary framework for building web apps), its creator, DHH, told everyone that it’s over, that we’ll just write specs in English, models will generate the code, and we’ll just review the output, but not the code.
People were angry. There was a thread in the Rails subreddit asking whether DHH had completely lost his mind. And this is what he responded on X:
“Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” — Galatians 4:16
It turns out coding is, in most use cases, a kind game, and computers and AI ghosts, as Andrej Karpathy likes to call them, are pretty good at it.
Grief and acceptance
I personally like Claude Code. I miss being in “the zone,” but the goal of programming was outcomes, making things, not staring at your methods after writing them for hours thinking: “Yeah, I’m so smart.”
Now I can deploy features faster, and focus on other, more wicked things. Robert Greene asked his readers to “assume formlessness.” Maybe in the (near) future nobody will be a programmer. DHH says he isn’t one now, and that he’s a professional maker.
The key here is probably letting go of the grief, but if you’ve spent your whole life mastering chess or Java, I get it, it’s hard.
The inevitable
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Moonshot aren’t going to stop training models. They’ll get better. At the moment, frontier models can do some things very well, others not so much.
In What Technology Wants (2010), Kevin Kelly talks in depth about technological determinism. The light bulb was invented in several places at the same time, and it was just bound to happen. By his logic, if we reran life on Earth, we’d end up with social media and AI. The constraints of physics and biology, whether God-given or universe-given, make it inevitable.
And now AI is here. Autocomplete on steroids? Sure, but it can code better than me, and it seems to “know” why something should be abstracted away into a trait or an interface.
The compromise
Writing code is a kind game. Deciding what’s worth building is a wicked one.
So, I don’t know, I’m with DHH on this, and I’ll take the advice he offered at Rails World on looking at the past with joy, being happy that I had the chance to write code by hand for many years, and spend countless hours in “the zone.” I’ll just keep making things, and let Claude do the typing. We still have the power to steer these “ghosts,” and, at least for now, they tend to do what we ask them to. How lucky are we?
Dan Berges is the founder and managing director of Berges Institute, an online Spanish language school, and lead developer of Berges AI, a text assistant built on open-weight models that gives direct, concise answers. He also publishes content in Spanish about descriptive grammar, semantics, and pragmatics on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.