Eric Neikrug wrote his first program in 1966. Twenty years into retirement, he built La Tavola, an iPhone and iPad app for planning dinner parties, in four months, working with AI.
In Eric’s words
I can give you an accurate account of what AI has done to software development — and a question about it that I can’t answer.
In 1966 I wrote my first program on a teletype machine that produced paper tape, which I fed into an optical reader on a DEC computer that was acting as a communications router. The language was assembly: one machine instruction for each line I wrote.
Since then, the languages have morphed into object-oriented ones, where a single line stands for large multiples of machine instructions. Hardware made equally dramatic gains in speed and power while the cost fell.
None of those changes comes close to what AI has done. Weeks of work now come out of a conversation.
I have been retired for 20 years. I am 86. I decided to try an experiment and build an iPhone app. My wife is always complaining that she can’t remember what she cooked for friends at our last dinner party, so I built her an app that keeps track of it.
With no prior knowledge of the iPhone’s hardware or its programming language, I built a complex app in four months by myself. It is in the App Store now.
In those four months the AI did the work of three programmers working for at least eighteen months. I base that estimate on nearly forty years of building and managing software projects — diagnostic programs, query optimization, corporate-wide backup systems.
I concluded that AI can eliminate most of the legwork of writing code, but not the judgment. It still needs an experienced architect to guide it. And that raises a conundrum I can’t resolve: how do you gain that experience if AI has eliminated all the entry-level jobs?
— Eric Neikrug, Sarasota, Florida
For reporters and podcasters
Eric is glad to talk about building software in 1966 and in 2026, what AI changes and what it doesn’t, and the question above. Write to eric@sailormansoftware.com.
The app
La Tavola keeps your recipes, your guests and their dietary preferences, and every dinner party you have given — so when you plan the next one, you can see what each guest was served before. Recipes scale to the number of guests, one shopping list covers the whole meal, and wine pairing suggestions come from the menu you planned. It runs on iPhone and iPad.
Free to download, with a free trial. More about La Tavola →