While I mostly agree with the article's premise (that AI will cause more software development to happen, not less) I disagree with two parts:

1. the opening premise comparing AI to dial-up internet; basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative. The Krugman quote is an extreme, notable outlier, and it gets thrown out around literally every new technology, from blockchain to VR headsets to 3DTVs, so just like, don't use it please.

2. the closing thesis of

> Consider the restaurant owner from earlier who uses AI to create custom inventory software that is useful only for them. They won’t call themselves a software engineer.

The idea that restaurant owners will be writing inventory software might make sense if the only challenge of creating custom inventory software, or any custom software, was writing the code... but it isn't. Software projects don't fail because people didn't write enough code.

Before I got my first full time software engineering gig (I had worked part time briefly years prior) I was working full time as a carpenter. We were paying for an expensive online work order system. Having some previous experience writing software for music in college and a couple /brief/ LAMP stack freelance jobs after college I decided to try to write my own work order system. It took me like a month and it would never have never scaled, was really ugly, and had the absolute minimum number of features. I could never had accepted money from someone to use it but it did what we needed and we ran with it for several years after that.

I was only able to do this because I had some prior programming experience but I would imagine that if AI coding tools get a bit better they would enable a larger cohort of people to build a personal tool like I did.

I don't think his quote is that extreme and it was definitely not obvious to most people. A common thing you heard even around 95 was "I've tried internet but it was nothing special".

> basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative.

That sounds pretty similar to long-distance phone calls? (which I'm sure was transformative in its own way, but not on nearly the same scale as the internet)

Do we actually know how transformative the general population of 1995 thought the internet would or wouldn't be?

>> Consider the restaurant owner from earlier who uses AI to create custom inventory software that is useful only for them. They won’t call themselves a software engineer.

I have a suspicion this is LLM text, sounds corny. There are dozens open source solutions, just look one up.