Blow argues software development hasn't advanced much since the early 2000s. As a game developer, I want to offer a counter point.

In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.

I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?

(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)

The video does actually answer its own title, which is refreshing.

And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.

Good supporting evidence for this is that it is changing your software dramatically if you're making your own personalized software to replace subscription software. That works incredibly well. Also there are some examples of companies doing huge swings they wouldn't have done without it like the AWS emulator that just came out.

Jonathan Blow is one guy. He made a couple pretty good games. He's not particularly visionary when it comes to software development. Or perhaps he is visionary but it remains to be seen if his vision for technology is really material.

He regularly denies the use of new technology that is genuinely useful, and is a fairly conservative dude (I mean in the non-political sense. I do not know his politics. He may be a conservative politically as well, but that would be independent of the point I'm making.)

I've worked with many engineers at many different scopes. Big companies, indie darlings, web services, games. Games is always the last to adapt, always the last to think that anything they didn't invent is worth their time. Blow has experience in that domain, and is colored by working in it, but I don't think he knows what's happening on the bleeding edge very well.

It is not the same, it is worst. Nothing seems functional nowadays

He sometimes has no clue what he talks about, he spoke against Docker and other technology that makes my everyday life easier

My software isn't the same. I recently built a Swift app: the screenshot annotation app of my dreams. I don't know Swift at all and that's fine because I saw 0 code during the build process.

And yet... the app works efficiently, has features like shape-smoothing for hand-drawn freeform annotations (I wouldn't even know where to start if I were tasked with this on macOS, for example), it's designed far more beautifully than I could have done, even after a decade of studying UI/UX, etc

Yes, AI solved coding... mostly. At least for indie devs.

It takes an entire business to publish a software product, not just engineers. It’s been a misdirection to blame engineering for productivity issues. If anything, the legal team contributes much more of the sloth, complexity and lethargy than the engineering team.

Legal has much more authority , and far less familiarity with the product, or even the customers. So they demand orthogonal, complicated and impractical requirements that are not even beneficial for risk mitigation. And they are slow at providing them – usually the bottleneck.

It’s not a simple LOC/day formula. If Southwest Airlines wanted to make major software improvements tomorrow, it certainly wouldn’t be the engineering team armed with Claude Code holding them back.

I think the main reason you haven't seen a lot of changes on the surface is that corporations as currently constructed largely cannot use them efficiently.

I have a personal project where I am merging 100+ PRs a week and at work I would be lucky to merge 8. I spend 20x as much time trying to get PRs merged as I do actually doing the work.

I'm on a project with 4 other people working on 4 or 5 microservices and I would get more, better, work done if I were on a team alone managing all 4 or 5 microservices myself.

We did have 30 years of software advancement; LLM are the next step. I would argue what we didn't have was 30 years of hardware advancement as everyone bought x86_64

Blow and coders have a hammer so all they see is nails; it didn't "solve coding" AI solved "machine state management". Totally different; human tagging/coding will still exist just at the presentation layer cause we don't need a bunch of syntax like:

def sumAllCustomerAccounts() { Some desired physical state of machine based on mathematical axioms }

AI solved naming that function (the coding with human context part) with

f() { generate a function to add all customer balances}

We moving on from 1960s and 70s machine state management, pushing context coding to the presentation layer

Blow is just doing that thing humans do where they wrap their entire identity up in who they were 30 years ago and still think that's who they are today and will be tomorrow; rotary phone companies, bowling alley equipment manufacturers... new generations are superseding them... circle of life Simba

Not really gonna put Blow and Carmack on a pedestal; they never invented computers or software dev. They came along in the middle of the hype. The read the manual for old machines. We're just moving on to new kinds of machines.

People flipped out over the printing press too. Nothing to see here; it's just the upper bound of the middle age generation having a mid-life crisis

If AI solved coding, why the hell is iOS 27 a dumpster fire? Slow AF

Imagination crisis. The people who understand how to architect software are spending their free time on social media saying "%%% IS INSANE" or something about "I one-shotted this %existing thing%".

The people who said building software wasn't the hard part before were right, you still need interesting problems to solve to find interesting things to build. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to find those. There aren't many interesting problems left to solve for other tech bros

The thing with Jonathan Blow is this, it's incredibly easy to tell ahead of time what he will think about any particular subject.

Anything that makes code more available to "normies" is something Jonathan Blow will absolutely hate. Why? Because Jonathan Blow HAS to be the smartest guy in the room, if he's somehow not the smartest guy in the room, there is something wrong with the room, nothing is ever wrong with Jonathan Blow.

So of course, Jonathan Blow thinks AI coding is terrible, only Jonathan Blow can be the best coder in the world, anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron.

If you don't hand-roll your own programming language and game engine to make your own game, you're a moron. Hell, he even has a video where he basically says if you don't make your own version of JSON and associated parser, you're a fucking idiot.

What I'm saying is this, Jonathan Blow's ego only sustains itself on the idea that he is right about everything and the smartest person on any given topic. The idea that AI might be better at coding than him causes him to implode in a narcissistic rage.

I was talking to my friend yesterday about what exactly has AI changed for us. Our lives are still the same( actually worse from job loss anxiety). If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.

My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier.

why is this downvoted?

It’s not the same , I’m sorry i literally used 20 usd subscription to build software services used to cost $10k+. Ask any sales Doing software sales perception of enterprise software also changed . From magic to “maybe we can vibe code it”

I find Jonathon Blow to be insufferable, but this is a good talk with good opinions.

I'm not sure if the software is really the same, but there are a lot of AI slop games, and also a lot of well-made AI games. The graphical improvement in recently successful indie games is astonishing. Realistically speaking, in the past there were many cases where people weren't good at shaders, but there are also many points where optimization has improved. At the art asset level, even if AI isn't used, there are many cases where the code is now far better optimized than before. When I decompile the recent code of indie games whose animation implementation was terrible in the past, I often find it genuinely impressive.

Realistically speaking, AI raised the average quality. Among today's AI slop games, there are many that would have been "at this level of quality, this game could succeed" in the past.

Realistically, that's how it is. So there will be many people telling bad-luck stories like "ever since AI came out, GitHub has stalled," but I think that's closer to the opposite — AI increased production so much that the supply chain itself can't keep up.

The thing is, I can't really agree with the claim that software is the same. I don't know about open source, but when I think about the state of code in code delivered to clients, I think there has been a dramatic rise. Separately from that, because products are pouring out, I think consumers' quality demands are rising far faster than production. Comparing early smartphone games with today's AI slop games makes this even more palpable.