DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

I love how people speak about Dreamweaver in the past, while Adobe keeps getting money for it,

https://developer.adobe.com/dreamweaver/

And yes, as you can imagine for the kind of comments I do regarding high level productive tooling and languages, I was a big Dreamwever fan back in the 2000's.

> glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was to web development what ...

I just sat here for 5 minutes and I wasn't able to finish that sentence. So I think that's a statement in itself.

I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s!

My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough

The issue is that it might look good but an LLM often inserts weird mistakes. Or ellipses. Or overindex on the training data. If someone is not careful it is easy to completely wreck the codebase by piling on seemingly innocuous commits. So far I have developed a good sense for when I need to push the llm to avoid sloppy code. It is all in the details.

But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues.

I am a bit concerned. Because the kind of software I am making, a llm would never prompt on its own. A junior cannot make it, it requires research and programming experience that they do not have. But I know that if I were a junior today, I would probably try to use llms as much as possible and would probably know less programming over time.

So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time. Perhaps a boon for senior engineers but how do we train junior devs in that environment? Force them to build slowly, without llms? Is it aligned with business incentives?

Do we create APIs expecting the code to be generated by LLMs or written by hand? Because the impact of verbosity is not necessarily the same. LLMs don't get tired as fast as humans.

It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.

> "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer

Reading books was never about knowledge. It was about knowhow. You didn't need to read all the books. Just some. I don't know how many developers I met who would keep asking questions that would be obvious to anyone who had read the book. They never got the big picture and just wasted everyone's time, including their own.

"To know everything, you must first know one thing."

Ah, but lets do leetcode on the whiteboard as interview, for an re-balancing a red-black tree, regardless of how long those people have been in the industry and the job position they are actually applying for.

>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious

it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age.

I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs.

> When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast.

But I mean, you can get by without memorizing stuff sure, but memorizing stuff does work out your brain and does help out in the long run? Isn't it possible we've reached the cliff of "helpful" tools to the point we are atrophying enough to be worse at our jobs?

Like, reading is surely better for the brain than watching TV. But constant cable TV wasn't enough to ruin our brains. What if we've got to the point it finally is enough?