Comment by benreesman

3 days ago

I don't even think we know how to do it yet. I revise my whole attitude and all of my beliefs about this stuff every week: I figure out things that seemed really promising don't pan out, I find stuff that I kick myself for not realizing sooner, and it's still this high-stakes game. I still blow a couple of days and wish I had just done it the old-fashioned way, and then I'll catch a run where it's like, fuck, I was never that good, that's the last 5-10% that breaks a PB.

I very much think that these things are going to wind up being massive amplifiers for people who were already extremely sophisticated and then put massive effort into optimizing them and combining them with other advanced techniques (formal methods, top-to-bottom performance orientation).

I don't think this stuff is going to democratize software engineering at all, I think it's going to take the difficulty level so high that it's like back when Djikstra or Tony Hoare was a fairly typical computer programmer.