From 500,000 Coders to 2.5 Million Devs: What Actually Changed? The programmer’s comparative advantage used to lie in being able to hold complex state in their head and to speak the dialects of...
I've been a bank mainframe programmer since 1983 and lived through the shrinking ranks of rowers and burgeoning army of coxswains. The excerpt ends on the word "accountability" and while reading it I was reminded of Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine". Toward the end, he describes an interview with Steve Jobs about the decline of IBM as they perfected "process" and lost sight of what they were trying to achieve. No problem is too simple to not abstract into insolubility. If late 90's process guides are used to train the LLMs, software development will have been confounded and given over to the bitter flames.
I've been a bank mainframe programmer since 1983 and lived through the shrinking ranks of rowers and burgeoning army of coxswains. The excerpt ends on the word "accountability" and while reading it I was reminded of Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine". Toward the end, he describes an interview with Steve Jobs about the decline of IBM as they perfected "process" and lost sight of what they were trying to achieve. No problem is too simple to not abstract into insolubility. If late 90's process guides are used to train the LLMs, software development will have been confounded and given over to the bitter flames.
:-)