I don't know what that entails, but something is going to happen.

I got into a discussion with some Rust compiler folks yesterday. I called Rust the "final human language we'll serialize our thoughts to": it's easy to write for LLMs, is super type safe, ergonomic, easy for humans to read and reason about, and has really nice deploy characteristics - single binary, no GC, bare metal, etc. If Python and Rust are equivalently easy to emit, you'll probably choose Rust if you're not bound to other choices.

People quipped back that this was absurd and that Rust is built for decades of future human use, that this kind of talk would put people off of Rust, and that they need to think of the future.

As if anything will be human in the coming decades.

Programming languages were punch cards.

But if coding were hard, then writing small pieces of code would be as hard as writing big pieces. To make an analogy, playing the violin in tune doesn't get any easier, the shorter the piece that you have to play.

Developing software is hard. Some sort of "phase transition" occurs when a project gets big and complex, where coding is no longer what makes it hard. And writing software in a way that is not a net burden to a project or organization is hard, involving not just complexity but humanity. Most smart people in an organization have subtly arranged their affairs so that their career progress doesn't hinge on the success of a software project.

I admit that I only say these things as an observer, since I can code all day, but didn't pursue a software development career.

I also admit that I'm waiting for AI to handle the second two levels of software development. I'll concede that AI can develop software when The Mythical Man Month no longer reads like it was written yesterday.

Why do you think in most technical organizations the higest ranking and highest paid engineers generally write the least amount of code (often none)?

Try running a business that doesn't have the revenues to support high wages and you'll quickly figure out why you will pay as much as possible every single time: It means you can buy your way out of hiring the riffraff. Why do you think these high paying jobs were premised on weird trivia tests and other things that had absolutely nothing to do with the job? Hint: It was a social test to see if you'd fit in to the culture.

There have always been legions of people in India ready and able to write code for practically nothing. It was never hard or expensive. But they didn't fit in socially.

I must be living in topsy turvey land because this is literally the opposite of what is true. When the time to build collapses, those things become the criticality of the entire product. From a customer perspective, those were always the things that mattered, the customer story. No customer cares how a thing was coded, they’ve ALWAYS cared about all those other things.

It's difficult when you're first learning but there are definitely much harder skills to learn.

Yeah building a web app can become somewhat easy, but is distributed machine learning? What about low level kernel code?

Creating a high performance general purpose database is hard, but once it exists and is properly configured, the SQL queries are much easier. They'd better be or we wasted a lot of time building that database.

Same with coding. Most programmers, and writers, are average. They are not doing amazing work. They get paid 80-120k, same as the HR professional, or the account manager.

Creating average work was always relatively easy for writing and coding and is now relatively easy for everyone.

Besides, loads of software that’s human written has people maintaining it that don’t understand what it’s doing or how it interacts with other systems or where bugs or edge cases will show up etc etc too. In fact I’d say most software is like this.

LLM’s probably make less security holes than humans at this point.

Ask yourself honestly, is this genie ever going back in the bottle? If not, you’re gonna have to find a way to come to terms with it my dude.

I’ve also found joy again in building things, but I never fetishised the code myself anyway, I suppose I just wasn’t built that way, which might mean I was always biased to be like this.

In fact your example demonstrates what the article says. Yeah the LLM made coding easier, and probably reduced your shipping time from a few days to a few hours.

Now - since you have solved the hardest problem and have all this valuable code - how long will it take you to turn your product into a business and generate enough money to support yourself?

That's the hard part.

It's nice you got something out of it in just two hours. If the LLM companies are doing their caching right, the next person to ask for this set of apps with prompts close enough to yours can get it in five minutes.

Also there's a typo in the URL.

Afaik the best AIs can win now but even they aren't playing 'perfect' unloseable games.