Comment by microtonal

Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be. I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.

It’s complicated. Especially because we had a huge regression in programming from roughly the mid-90s until recently.

In the early 90s I used Turbo Pascal as a kid. It was an editor with an awesome built-in debugger, profiler, online help, super fast compiler. This all culminated into Delphi, which had all that and offered drag-and-drop UI building.

Programming regressed a lot after the demise of Borland IDEs. Especially on Linux/Unix the tooling was very primitive in comparison.

In a very weird way, LLMs brought back a bit of these old environments in the sense that you can use one interface for programming, debugging and profiling. It just does more of the boring work for us (cross-referencing code, writing profiling cases, etc.

Other than that, LLMs, etc. would be so foreign for someone from the 80s that their minds would be blown and it would look like alien technology.