15 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsin the future, humans won't find a bug or an issue with the code produced by a model, at least not in a reasonable time. Humans will only review the system and its composition, but it won't be in PRs and it won't be by looking through every line of the code.
Their wordsThe craft of writing code will disappear. Yes, there are still Italian shoe makers around. But look at your feet. The craft of building software will be more important than ever.
Their wordsMost bugs won't be "coding" bugs. They'll be "you asked for the wrong thing" bugs.
Their wordsOpen source in it's current form doesn't make sense anymore. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs.
Their wordsPerformance critical contributions by humans will stay what they are: an edge case. In 99% of software it does not matter that you could've written a faster algorithm or picked a better data structure.
Their wordsThe terminal is dead. Most developer tooling will be washed away by tokens. Shells, text editors, CLI tools won't be used by humans anymore. There's no need to know command line flags and jq invocations anymore.
Their wordsTokens are the new computing paradigm. Everything will be re-made on top of it. We've had deterministic computers for 80 years, so we confuse "how computers have worked" with "how computers must work." We're entering the post-binary era.
Their wordsThe triad of PM/Design/Eng will disappear. It does not make any bit of sense anymore. Agile, SCRUM, whatever -- dead.
Their words"Engineers" who act as "meat proxies" and shove tickets into agents and report back to humans will no longer be valuable.
Their wordsThe difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
Their wordsThere's no proof that "good code" will matter in the future. The notion of "good code" itself is mostly based on the idea that it's easy/cheap/efficient for humans to work with. But humans won't modify the majority of code.
Their wordsYes. Some people will be priced out of producing software. Just like only some people could afford a personal computer in the 80s and 90s, for the next few years, if you can't get enough tokens, you're playing second league.
Their wordsAnd what we consider a smart model today will be considered very dumb in the future. But a smarter model makes less mistakes, needs fewer turns.
Their wordsA lot of UI exists because software can't understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.
Their wordsIt'll take a generation for the "new software" to replace the "old software". Just like there are people happily employed as ASP developers today, there will be people employed to write code in 10 years.