I feel like with software, things have gotten way too complicated (just layer's upon layers upon layers). But to deal with that complexity, now we're using something that just creates WAY more complexity. I've been coding for a while, and I remember the 90s and early 00s where people could make pretty powerful applications with like visual basic or php with essentially no formal training. Those technologies weren't great, but they were really simple and easy to pick up. In contrast, if you try to pick up web development or desktop app development today, it's absolutely overwhelming. Like, something like React is useful but the amount of things you need to know to use it properly is pretty high.

I think introducing AI to deal with this is overall a mistake though. We're just adding more complexity on top of the existing complexity. At best, it's a massive waste of hardware. At worst, we'll probably have agents introducing as many bugs as they fix as they also drown in complexity, and a lot of stuff built using these techniques are going to be fragile garbage while the overall skillset of humanity diminishes because people aren't learning the skills anymore.

Fundamentally, software does not need to be this complicated and it's a solvable problem, but it does require people that care about craftsmanship.

I had a discussion with folks at work about what information is worth retaining in the face of AI doing everything for us. A lot of what we have in our heads to qualify as "domain experts" is pretty esoteric. How to invoke command line tools, gotchas because library A uses one convention over library B, AWS vs GCP; so much is specific to a tool rather than a method. There are also a lot of entrenched tools that are effectively unfixable due to the risk of breaking changes, so you have to shrug and accept + learn that's how it works.

Catch-22 is it's still important to know the fundamentals so you know what to ask for, but if you don't know the esoterica, the model is eventually going to make an assumption and screw things up. And the models don't have much taste either in prose, or in coding/comment style.

And what's ironic is that a lot of those layers and complexity were added with the stated goal of making it easier for average developers to build applications.

Amen.

Drowning in complexity. Paralysis of choice.

I read a comment (joke) that if you want to follow all LLM development you should have to be unemployed.