We have both forgotten how to make things and also decided we can make more profit letting someone else make everything for every market. We have moved to a generation fixated on maximizing profit. However there is logic there as the cost to access the ability to make things is prohibitively expensive. As someone who makes open hardware with a nod to the environment and reusability, you can not justify or even find more locally sourced options than China.

Coding is different though, coding doesn't have a cost barrier, it has a ability barrier. I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming and perhaps go back to a happy equilibrium. AI is only production ready if you have someone who understands software development. AI will improve speed to market if you have the right team, it doesn't remove the need for some to learn to code. You will of course end up with startups using exclusively AI but they will be those who end up with major security breaches or simply cannot scale as the AI goes in the wrong direction for the future. Tbh that's probably a positive as it weeds out the start ups that are focused on buzzwords for funding and not product.

▲

xantronix 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No matter what happens to the viability of software development as a career, I will always care about the craft as I have done the past twenty years and change. The imperatives to adopt LLMs in situations where they do not benefit me nor my work is what is driving me away. I have to agree with latexr; the people who seem to benefit the most from the current moment are those who see software as a means to an end without much concern for quality, longevity, nor customer experience.

Why is speed-to-market such an important metric? I do not understand the need to mimic the largest players in the industry, nor do I see any particularly profound long term benefits to first mover advantage.

▲

latexr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming

Anecdotally, what I’m seeing right now is the opposite. People who don’t care about programming are joining, while those who do care are getting tired of the bullshit and leaving. The good programmers are the ones leaving, the hacks are extremely happy to use LLMs.

When shit hits the fan, there won’t be many people left to clean it.

▲

trick-or-treat 5 hours ago | parent [-]

So you see people who don't care about programming, joining and getting comfortable with vscode and claude code and devops?

Because it seems to me like there's a lot of coding-adjacent things they still need to be able to do even if they never look at a line of code.

▲

latexr 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Those examples are nonsensical. None of those are necessary to get working code. The VSCode example is particularly baffling. Firstly, I’m sure you understand there are other editors people use for code; secondly, I know even people who don’t code who have picked up VSCode for text editing and are fine with it.

▲

trick-or-treat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you haven't dealt with a lot of non-coders. 90% of the world will not be able to even open a .py

	▲	latexr 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I think you haven't dealt with a lot of non-coders. And I think you should avoid making assumptions about people you know nothing about. That is so far from the truth it’s not even funny. > 90% of the world will not be able to even open a .py Which is nowhere near my argument. I’d appreciate if you engaged with what I said or not at all.