Comment by 9rx
10 hours ago
Foundational software requires that, but the foundation is pretty much completely built at this point. The workforce required to keep it running is but a tiny fraction of what was required to build it. The past has shown that innovation in hardware can push for the foundations to be rebuilt, but we've also already got computers basically everywhere now. There may not be some new innovation that requires the foundations to be completely rewritten again.
The little one-off programs that we thought would keep developers busy forevermore don't require engineers. They often don't even require code. LLMs can natively do a lot of things that historically would have required software.
Such black and white thinking. Even the little tools fall apart at first sight of an edge case if they are fully vibed. Neither Opus nor codex are good at architecture, and it’s not clear they ever will be.
You still seem to be thinking about code in the traditional sense. A lot of the software I am using now in my non-tech business isn't rooted in code at all. It is simply asking an LLM to carry out a task. Still programming, of course, but not with a traditional programming language. The LLM will produce the excepted results in realtime. The intermediary step of building an executable is totally unnecessary.
In the olden days it would have taken considerable engineering effort to produce a comparable tool. That is no longer the case.