That was a joy to read.
I have a lot of thoughts on all this. Some are well formed, others aren't. We are living in very disorienting times right now.
What happens when software becomes superabundant? Who will use the software, if everyone and their dog creates 15 apps a day? Will everything just be a throw-away product, just like the plastic spoons and drinking straws at McDonald's?
I tried to answer some of these questions in my recent conversation with @Gzuuus (and will continue to do so every time I take someone on a @No Solutions walk).
On the bright side: everything is an open-source app now. You can reverse-engineer anything; you can point your clankers at a product, and tell them that you want the same thing, but under an MIT license. That's a positive feedback loop that will continue to accelerate.
On the not-so-bright side: The craft of software development is as dead as riding a horse for transportation purposes is dead. Yes, people still ride horses, but if you want to get from A to B you won't use a horse.
Tradcoding will be a thing. It already is a thing. Writing software by hand, line-by-line, because you like doing it, because you enjoy the craft, or because you're rich and you have too much free time. Fine. But 99.99% of software will be written by clankers. It already is the case, in all likelihood.
What the clankers don't have (yet) is taste and values. And by that I mean: good taste, and outside-of-the-bell-curve values. They don't care about the information they are processing, to paraphrase John Vervaeke. Thus: IF you care and IF you have good taste THEN the clankers are a superpower. If you don't care and you don't have any taste all you'll be able to produce is slop. (By definition.)
This begs the question: where does good taste come from? (And where do we get our values from?)
I'm not sure if it's possible to develop good taste without putting your nose to the grindstone for 10,000 hours straight. Go through he motions. Make all the mistakes. Feel the pain. Blood, sweat, and tears.
How else would you ever be able to learn to care? Or does caring come first, and it is what allows you to endure the suffering?
One of my worries is that, if you're born in the slop, molded by it, you won't be able to develop the taste and discernment necessary to produce good artifacts, software or otherwise.
Maybe I'm wrong and the kids will be alright, but just like we've lost our natural ability to navigate an environment (because we invented GPS) I'm afraid that we'll lose our ability to learn and discern, and by that I mean *really* learn. The kind of learning that is bound to sacrifice. The kind of learning that is bound to sweat, and blood, and tears.
Software development is now effortless, all things considered. I'm not saying that prompting things into existence is trivial, but in the last 18 months that I've been doing it I didn't break a sweat. The hard work is gone. What used to be a picks and shovels exercise is now me sitting in a Schaufelradbagger, moving earth like nobody's business. It's magical. And terrifying. But most of all, it's disorienting.
What should one build, if anything can be built?
Time is still the ultimate resource, no matter how fast the agents can generate code. We *spend* time and *pay* attention, and as always, the most important question is what we should spend these currencies on. So... What to build? There it is again: discernment. And don't ask your clankers, they won't be able to answer that question for you, at least not in a meaningful way.
I'm getting more done than ever, but pride in my work is at an all-time low. The average quality of the work I do has improved dramatically over the last 6 months. Many of the engineering disciplines I neglected or never learned happen automatically now.
It used to be I would sweat to make something I was proud of, because I believed it was worthwhile to do so. The bad parts were bad, and many, but eclipsed by the purposefulness of the work that drove me to do it. And the good parts were good, because they were real — because I cared enough to discover them.
I'm not espousing the labor theory of value. I'm not talking about some essential, ineffable "good" in craftsmanship. What I'm saying is that sweat is an essential ingredient in producing something with a soul: something that people can love. People don't love commodities, they love singular things. The commodification of software is killing the love of it.
In other words: other people loved the garbage I used to craft more than the garbage I now produce.
Nowadays, all the parts of my work that used to be low quality are high quality, because Claude is a better programmer than I am. But the parts of my work that used to be good haven't survived. I might be trying to do something worthwhile, but because I haven't actually engaged with the problem I can't make anything better than slop materialize. The glory has departed.
Flotilla has greatly profited from me using AI to code, because the good parts only I could build were already there, and there was a lot of bad stuff that needed to be fixed.
But the way I feel about other projects that I haven't gone through that journey with is that they are garbage. Total trash. They are as valuable as the tokens I used to generate them. Because there's nothing really there. There is nothing to love. There is nothing singular. They are disposable, fungible.
When people refer to themselves as "idea guys" it means they suck at doing real work. But their ideas can only exist if someone takes the time to make their ideas a reality. But in the New Age of AI, idea guys can finally realize their genius, without being held back by a bunch of narrow-minded technicians!
But I think it will turn out that there wasn't actually any genius there in the first place, and everything that was of value about the original idea was actually discovered during the process of building it by the people who did the work to make it a reality.
Software as an art, or a craft — as a thing which is an object affection — is dying. This is fine, the affection was probably misplaced in the first place. A new kind of software — the stuff we create for ourselves, that no one else will ever see — will probably absorb some of that affection. The rest will be commodified.
I think this goes for every industry, by the way. An accountant can feel proud of his spreadsheet, a plumber of his solder, a salesperson of his pitch, even a developer of his agent harness. He can love the work of his hands and have affection for it. It can be singularly valuable to someone, and a conduit of love between the people concerned.
Does an assembly line worker feel affection for the parts he stamps out, or the people who receive them? Is oil extracted with heart? Are the foundations of skyscrapers filled in with love? Does the dollar store worker bask in the sunshiny faces of the children purchasing their very own extruded plastic disposable pseudo toys?
Maybe they do. I do think that wherever humans use tools, there will be affection. It reminds me of the nose art pilots used to paint on their bombers. "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine."
Maybe means I should buy a mechanical keyboard, I don't know. DAU and MRR probably engender warm fuzzies in some types of people, but I'm not one of them.
Commodities are not necessary for a good life. A community can live without commodities, and survive. If everything were hand-made, pride and affection would ubiquitous - and its absence would be traceable to a character flaw in the worker. If every meal came from an animal who had a name instead of a number, every meal would embody gratitude and grief like no store-bought meal could.
I yearn to live that life and check out of this Terry Gilliam-esque Hotel California life, I say as I glance out the side of my eyes at the people I know who have just bought a couple dairy cows and moved out to some acreage, and keep typing.
Am I a coward for wanting to stay where it's comfortable and secure? Where my skills (or what's left of them) are in demand? Is my heart too bound up with the bounty of the market that I have become a commodity myself?
Or am I a whiner for being so sad about losing the drudgery of programming? For not wanting to live on a diet of petrochemical-derived macro-nutrients? For not wanting to spend hours a week in a car driving to an office where I work by myself?
"Better a handful with quietness Than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind."
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