Yes. As machhine power and memory increased, and as as programming abstractions advanced, software grew larger and more bloated, therefore what used to run on a single core in KB of RAM now takes multiple cores and GB of ram.

The developers who knew how to write efficient low-level code found that there were no jobs for that anynmore, so today the developers who can work at that level are very few.

The same will happen with AI being the new abstraction. In another decade or two, very few people will be able to write code by hand. We'll need a rack of compute in a data center and multiple KW of power to do what we used to do on a desktop PC drawing a couple of hundred Watts.

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jdprgm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The funny thing is it appears we may see a return to the software output from AI being efficient low level code. So while the compute to actually write the software rockets upwards the software itself might broadly become dramatically more efficient again.

	▲	SoftTalker an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I suppose that is possible, but I have not seen it yet. When I ask an LLM to write code for me, "dramatically efficient" are not the adjectives that come to mind to describe the results. Usually "well, it works" is about as good as I can hope for, and I often don't even get that at least on the first iteration.