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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-software-simplification-cobol-ai-hype/
26•dinvlad•3d ago

Comments

cjfd•1h ago
The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.
Havoc•57m ago
It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools.

What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers

ares623•35m ago
They can rent their own tools, more like.
bananaflag•1h ago
Yeah but this time it's for real.

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.

ryanjshaw•1h ago
Until a year ago I believed as the author did. Then LLMs got to the point where they sit in meetings like I do, make notes like I do, have a memory like I do, and their context window is expanding.

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.

Havoc•55m ago
History reviews is not a great way to approach ground breaking tech

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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-software-simplification-cobol-ai-hype/
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