This morning it finally came home to me. I will probably never write another program in C again. Which is a big deal. I've been writing C since 1983. 43 years is a long time and a lot of skill investment. It's not like I didn't see this coming. I've been writing about the decline of C for years, predicting that it would be displaced by newer systems languages with better safety guarantees and more coherent designs. It wasn't better language design alone that did it, though. It's how good LLMs now are at generating code from specs and prompts. This means I can speak a program into existence in Rust or Go without any more effort than would be required to conjure it up in C. What makes this particularly dramatic is that I never learned to hand-code in Rust. And now - I don't need to. What a long, strange trip it's been.