Comment by skor

well, I'm going to reference [1] a comment on the "Who Cares Era" that really stood out and maybe should get pinned somewhere.

What about that "superpower" we had to make something out of _nothing_ but our own brains? Sure, you may have looked up some code (do some research and learn), but that mental exercise.. just knowing your code inside-out, can never be compared to the "oh look at that, it actually works" with LLM stuff.

Well guess what, now, you traded that superpower for a subscription! (yes, you are now a middle man of software peddling - paying some company that stole other peoples code and ideas and did not pay _them anything_ in return), and eventually you will get to a point when the internet is down, you won't write any software that day cause you cant get the N model to work.

Did we go to the next step in software evolution? If it has a cost per month (and you pay thieves) (yes that what they are), its going to be a hard "no" for me, you just became a cow. Sure, now this is whats expected of you? OK. This has some strong neoliberalism drift, I assume I can be wrong so please comments welcome I am quite interested in this part.

yes, augmentations seem like amputations, is it McLuhan? I'm not sure, Will we retain our power to produce software? No! Humans dumb down very quickly, a generation is all it took to reduce reading to kids below expected educational levels [2]. There will be less professionals and lots of peddlers that have no skills, and software will be so junk it will be seriously scary to catch a plane in 10 years time.

Interesting times.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116724 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-p...