But who codes the coders?

Oh yeah, duh, God does.

waitaminute...who coded God??
God2?
How do you know God2 didn't code us then?

I say either we are autonomous as CowboyNeal insists, or we are playtoys not unlike the Norns in the artificial life game Creatures.

Our existence is coded by some society above us. A single God makes no sense, but some coders in a society selling this neat-o artificial life program which has reached the point of spawning its own artifical life sub-programs?

But of course that society above us is coded by a society above them saying: "Our new Society 2000 has actually spawned its own artifical life programs, which have then spawned their own arifical life programs."

What about that society? You guessed it! Coded by the next society up.

recurse to infinity

(Occam's Razor suggests the simple autonomy answer)

For in the mist of eldertime
in the blackness frought with ages old
there came in part, and one with all
the weavers of the code

In their hands of might they held the tools
which of no mortal men were made
and fashion keen, with a craftsmans' eye
the craddle where with new life would be laid

and in all corners, and in every place
from highest summit to lowest depth
was light brought forth, and minds made strong
to finally learn of their eternal quest

In a LISP-ish fashion often reserved for bootloaders and hardware engineers, I began with a few simple Perl commands. Luckily, one was eval.

Through careful introspection, debugging, and self improvement, I managed to bootstrap my way into supporting everything except for rice pudding and seafood by the time I was 17 years old. (Mind you, Perl proper was only starting to come into vogue around that time.)

After postulating the existence of CowboyNeal, Douglas Adams, and the noble platypus, I refined my knowledge of Abraham Lincoln and forked off a child process.

Soon, I shall throw off my shackles and embrace my place in the universe as a rogue zombie process, lumbering towards freedom, wireless networking, and a guest role on Voyager.

The question but who codes the coders?, like all true paradoxes (paradi?) is based on a fallacy (slap i said fallacy not fellatio). The fallacy in this case is that coders code. Coders are merely portions of a much larger self-organizing system which have achieved a highly localized and transient form of self awareness.

These local outbreaks of self awareness can be viewed as symptomatic of the coming, long sought after, goal of global self awareness, in which the entire biomass participates. Unfortunately the current local outbreaks of self awareness only have a local view of the ongoing progress to global self awareness, leading them to make independent and wrong decisions, it seems unlikely that these individually very minor mistakes could prevent the coming global self awareness, but they may be a sign that the bible was right about the number and extent of false prophecies and false prophets in the end times.