[Shindi]

Agreed. There is quickly going to be a bigger chasm between the best devs and average/bad devs bc of LLMs.

[Swizec]

Yes. The best race car drivers use an automatic transmission if that’s 0.5 seconds faster per lap.

In fact driver aids had to be actively banned in many racing series. Just to make it more fun for spectators.

[throwaway290]

Performance with auto transmission says less about the driver but more about the tech team.

And yes, the point of these racing regulations is to make it at least optically a driver skill competition, not just who can throw more money at a pretty mundane challenge of getting from A to B the fastest. (If not for those regulations, since the track is known to the centimeter, the fastest driver would probably be the lightest one because it would be dead weight.)

Thankfully software engineering challenges are far from mundane, so the chasm will indeed grow

[dahfizz]

> If not for those regulations, since the track is known to the centimeter, the fastest driver would probably be the lightest one because it would be dead weight.

Maybe if everyone took turns setting times. But in a real race, you have to deal with traffic, figure out how to pass, etc.

[throwaway290]

> Maybe if everyone took turns setting times.

Time attack is a type of race. But anyway, if "other racing cars" is the only real variable it's hardly a challenge for autopilot software and the driver may as well be gone. Regulations exist since traditional mainstream audience may not find this show quite as engaging.

Again, the analogy is broken. Automatic transmission, full autopilot, these things would objectively help win the race (if make it boring), but creating good software is a little more involved than "who can type faster".

[Swizec]

> Thankfully software engineering challenges are far from mundane, so the chasm will indeed grow

Yes, if you let AI/tooling/interns do the mundane parts, you’ll have more time for the good parts

[throwaway290]

If your bottleneck is typing speed, sure maybe...

[Swizec]

That's what makes them the mundane parts.

[throwaway290]

Try DRY. I find typing the furthest from performance bottleneck

[pleb_nz]

And often hand crafted guys have more character, story and quality behind them and people often pay more for them. So goes both ways sometimes.

[skor]

this. when a programmer cannot explain how something works and just say, “oh this part was generated” ... well, thats worthless, because there is no ownership of knowledge.

[jacquesm]

Inevitably that would lead to the driver being phased out at some point.

[hcks]

This is just wishful thinking of course.

The shell itself is an outdated piece of technology that unfortunately has to be used for historical reasons. I’m glad we now see a way to work past it.

[MereInterest]

What would you describe as a better tool? GUIs definitely aren’t it, as they can’t be composed together. APIs are great when they exist, but are often far too verbose for one-off tasks.

Relevant here, a GPT-powered shell throws away the repeatability and predictability that shells have. There’s nothing to say that a different random seed or a little more training data won’t change the interpretation of a task that was specified in the vagaries of natural language.

[indymike]

Please point me to something better.