I think this is a really meaningful insight. There's passion projects and there's - let's call it "industrial production".

Developers long had the privilege that what they were passionate about also aligned with what industries needed - at least somewhat. Then, outsourcing dev shops and later Claude and Codex turned code into industrial production. That doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy sipping a nice glass of wine and coding the 2D platformer we always wanted to exist - but it does mean that industrial production of code is less satisfying now.

The same is true for mathematicians and will be true for ever-increasing swaths of life. It's understandable to be sad about it and to miss the times when you were the mythical 10x coder with the super-high bus factor - but it is important to distinguish between activity oriented towards individual satisfaction and activity oriented towards outcomes, and not to allow the first to hinder the second.

This advice is so contrary to good outcomes that I am astonished. Even aside from the amazing utility of funding super smart people to follow their curiosity about the world, maths, species, string theory, neural networks, etc., just keeping it to coding, you don’t want engineering to just implement specs, you want curious people to dig under what is being said; the space of potential solutions in software is so great that you can’t waterfall your way into the best solution; it is a search, and one where the quest for elegance and abstraction and beauty enable not a ten X coder but a solution that catapults the company 100 or 1000 fold over the competitors with less elegant solutions. It’s the whole ideal behind Paul Graham’s beating the odds. It’s the story of companies that grew 70% a month while their competitors tried to make plans. Maybe you all are too young but companies that innovate and constantly delight the community are possible and systems that implement the software can be amazingly more elegant and expandable than expected. on the outsourcing, the places I have seen outsourcing succeed it is because the company can find and pay more minds either that precious gift of abstraction and simplicity and created or renovated systems so well that the outcomes based teams were just scratching their heads in wonder, if they had enough wit.

I have seen inelegant minds generate big balls of crap with AI and I have seen people wield them like scalpers thru the space of possible solutions.

I don’t disagree with using LLMs, but some puritan call for industrial efficiency as the answer is really missing the story on the last forty years of software innovation.

If the parent and grand parent represent common attitudes, no wonder so many companies are constrained by ugly software.

I really can't get behind this. The idea that our jobs being interesting and fulfilling was just a happy little accident, a weird artifact of capitalism, and that if that goes away, oh well, too bad. Back to the thankless back-breaking grind. It's just the way of the world.

That's just so defeatist and pessimistic.

Completely right. I think what is suprising about this wave of automation is that until now automation happened to more manual, blue collar work. I for one didn't really think that it will happen to software development up until some months ago.