See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... for how Stephenson considered the essay obsolete five years later.

> There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

I know Neal said the essay was quickly obsolete, especially in regards to Mac, but I'll always remember this reference about hermetically sealed Apple products. To this day, Apple doesn't want anyone to know how their products work, or how to fix them, to the point where upgrading or expanding internal hardware is mostly impossible (no M-series Mac Pro discrete GPUs?). Even after 25 years, some things never change.

I remember this being discussed at Slashdot, with the author replying, back in the days. Predecessor of Reddit AMA, it was probably just called Q&A.

Given that LLMs can make their own calls to the command line, I think it's obsolete ten times over. Much of the learning curve - and therefore most of the downside from CLIs, is now gone. A person can now learn only the most basic facts about operating systems - and let the AI handle the rest. Given all of that, I'm not sure where the world of software and IT is heading.

There's a danger though that people won't even learn the basics.