Which includes this excellent line:

> Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.

I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.

Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?

To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on reality.

But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.

So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.

There are bookoo other things people could be doing besides coding YASW [Yet Another Stupid Website].

The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C and this wasn’t going to change any time soon.

Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.

Don’t facilitate losing your job.

Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.

Of course, in the end, it won't do us humans any good, because when the Singularity AKA Rapture comes, we'll all be converted to Computronium. :-)

I recall Power builder in particular it was the rage.

- Software engineering is a cost center, they are middlemen between the C-level ideas and a finished product.

- Software engineering is about figuring out how to automate a problem, exploring the domain, defining context, tradeoffs, and unlocking new capabilities in the process

Arguably programming is as much learning as it is writing code. This is part of the reason some people copy an entire API and don't realise they're not so much building useful code as building an understanding.

You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.

Every recession where there was mass lay-offs on programmers (not every recession hits programmers hard), there were many articles saying that whatever that latest thing [see article] was the cause of this and industry is getting rid of programmers they will never need again.

In every case of course "it is the economy stupid". The tools made little difference in the need for programmers. The tools that worked actually increased the need because things you wouldn't even attempt without the tools were now worth hiring extra people to do.

Only issue I saw after a month of building something complex from scratch with Opus 4.6 is poor adherence to high-level design principles and consistency. This can be solved with expert guardrails, I believe.

It won’t be long before AI employees are going to join daily standup and deliver work alongside the team with other users in the org not even realizing or caring that it’s an AI “staff member”.

It won’t be much longer after that when they will start to tech lead those same teams.

> "The name derived from the idea that The Last One was the last program that would ever need writing, as it could be used to generate all subsequent software."

That was released in 1981. Spoiler alert: it was not, in fact, the last one.

I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to evaporate; necessitating AI-assistance.

The reason is it different this time around is because the capabilities of LLMs have incentivized the professional class to betray the institutions that enabled their specializations. I am talking about the amazing minds at Adobe, Figma, and the FAANGS who are bridging agentic reasoners and diffusion models with domain-specific needs of their respective professional users.

Humans are class of beings, and the humans accelerating the advance of AI in creative tools are the reason that things are different this time. We have class traitors among us this time, and they're "just doing their jobs". For most, willful disbelief isn't even a factor. They think they're helping while each PR just brings them closer to unemployment.

All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace.

AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous and not cover all the bases. And people are familiar with natural language. And it can fill in the missing details and disambiguate the others.

This has been known to be possible for decades, as (simplifying a bit) the (non-technical) manager can order the engineer in natural, ambiguous language what to do and they will do it. Now the AI takes the place of the engineer.

Also, I personally never believed before AI that programming will disappear, so the argument that "this has been hyped before" doesn't touch my soul.

I have no idea why this is so hard to understand. I'd like people to reply to me in addition to downvoting.