I can’t claim to be a professional software developer—not by a long shot. I occasionally write some Python code to analyze spreadsheets, and I occasionally hack something together on my own, usually related to prime numbers or numerical analysis. But I have to admit that I identify with both of the groups of programmers that Les Orchard identifies in “ Grief and the AI Split ”: those who just want to make a computer do something and those who grieve losing the satisfaction they get from writing good code. A lot of the time, I just want to get something done; that’s particularly true when I’m grinding through a spreadsheet with sales data that has a half-million rows. (Yes, compared to databases, that’s nothing.) It’s frustrating to run into some roadblock in pandas that I can’t solve without looking through documentation, tutorials, and several incorrect Stack Overflow answers.…