"When you start coding, it makes you feel smart, like you're in the Matrix [film]," says Janine Luk, a 26-year-old software engineer working in London.
Born in Hong Kong, she began her career in yacht marketing in the south of France but found it "a bit repetitive and superficial."
So, she started teaching herself to code after work and then attended a 15-week coding boot camp.
On the last day of the boot camp, she applied for a job at the cybersecurity software company Avast and started there a week later.
"Two and a half years later, I really think it's the best decision I ever made," she reflects.
When she joined the company, she was the first female developer on her team. Now, she spends her free time encouraging other women, people of color, and LGBT individuals to try coding.
For programmers like her, the most interesting recent change has been the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can handle increasingly large parts of programming on their own.
In June, GitHub, a San Francisco-based code-hosting platform with 56 million users, introduced a new AI tool called Copilot.
You start typing a few characters of code, and the AI suggests how to finish it. "The single most mind-blowing application of machine learning I've ever seen," Instagram's co-founder Mike Krieger said about Copilot.
It is based on an artificial intelligence called GPT-3, released last summer by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI lab co-founded by Elon Musk.
This GPT (which stands for generative pre-training) engine performs a "very simple but very large task—predicting the next letter in a text," explains Grzegorz Jakacki, the Warsaw-based founder of Codility, which creates a popular hiring test.
OpenAI trained the AI using texts already available online, such as books, Wikipedia, and hundreds of thousands of web pages. This collection was "somewhat curated but in all possible human languages," he says.
And "spookily, it wasn't taught the rules of any particular language," adds Mr. Jakacki.
The result was believable passages of text.
People have since asked it to write in various styles, like new Harry Potter stories, but in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Chandler.