March 20, 2026
Does Computer Science Still Exist?
I have always seen the computer as a tool that gives us new ways to think.
Does it still?
As I write this, Claude Code has just finished making a Javascript port of Hack, the text-based dungeon crawler from my childhood. I handed the agent the old PDP code and told it to go. When I checked after a couple hours to ask why it was taking so long, it replied: it was working, and that thirteen of twenty-three test sessions were already passing parity. It continued its coding process without interruption all night, and eventually expanded its work to 202 passing tests, achieving near 100% coverage with verified parity to the original.
While I slept it was working hard: debugging, reasoning, fixing genuine bugs. Not instant. Yet almost entirely on its own....
Brian Harvey's Computer Club students in 1982, when they created Hack