Comment by cowlevel

7 hours ago

Devs were always feeding the machine to replace everyone else.

We were always replacing ourselves: Every "reusable" function or class or library you ever wrote represents lines of code won't get paid to write again. Every compiler takes jobs away from assembly coders.

The looming thing today is qualitatively different, because it's not formalizing something to reliably mass-produce.

  • > We were always replacing ourselves: Every "reusable" function or class or library you ever wrote represents lines of code won't get paid to write again

    In theory, but not in practice. Instead, somehow we ended up writing essentially the same app over and and over, usually without reusing libs. You know because this time we'll use vue, or svelte, or phoenix, or htmx, or go, because this time we actually know what we're doing. so gotta start from the ground up and figure out how to store a row in a db as if we haven't done the same thing a million times before.

    And that all under one roof. Now multiple that by thousands of roofs.

    At least the devs were having fun and making good money writing all that code.

It’s a point that isn’t made often. AI is mostly saying the quiet part out loud.

The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.

  • > There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.

    And that reason is "service businesses are too expensive in California because of high housing costs".