“
Over the last decade, coding has become increasingly abstract. Thanks to the open-source software movement, engineers have access to vast online troves of free code they’d otherwise have to write themselves. At the same time, companies like Apple and Google have built tool kits for programmers who want to design apps. A lot of iPhone apps use the same scroll feature, for example. That’s because Apple offers it as a free “black box” tool—you can use it, you just can’t open it up to see how it works. In a sense, coders aren’t builders so much as D.J.’s, pulling a few lines of code here and a black box there and smushing them together.
