[ceejayoz]

> It is one of the weirdest IT problems I've ever encountered and it makes me wonder how much of what we rely on is actually marginal.

Vernor Vinge had a character who was a "Programmer-Archeologist" on a relativistic starship. Feels more and more prescient as time goes on.

[cmehdy]

I work at a company that invented an internal syntax to compile into C++ code, that still relies on c-shell and conventions taken when OS/2 was in use there, and with a web of Jenkins instances and homemade wrappers and DBs to build that stuff.

I can safely say that title exists already. And I value my current experience as a humbling example of what is to come as software becomes an older industry, and not just a world of startups and their freshest languages/frameworks/tools.

[thwarted]

The way you describe this system is exactly how I'd describe a system I worked on in the early 90s at PW (before it was PWC).

[gnerd00]

jenkins did not exist though

[pbh101]

I thought that too up until this GenAI moment, and now I wonder if needing to be an archaeologist will be so valuable if one can get your needs met by a quickly GenAI-written script/program.

[palmotea]

> I thought that too up until this GenAI moment, and now I wonder if needing to be an archaeologist will be so valuable if one can get your needs met by a quickly GenAI-written script/program.

I never have actually read those books (though I read some summaries about them, interesting concepts). My understanding is the "programmer-archeologists" basically had an archive of massive quantities of very high-quality software that did pretty much anything you'd want software to do. So it made more sense to find the software you need and glue it together than write from scratch.

And given GenAI doesn't write high quality software (at least not yet, and hopefully never), I don't think that "GenAI-written script/program" would be a good replacement (though an AI archeologist might make more sense, with such an archive).

[pbh101]

The world in question is ours but later, with direct lineage from Unix systems indicated. So I see these archaeologists as a glorified priesthood of shell scripters, grep still having bugs, and the glue being programs themselves. Not too different than many roles today.

Beyond that, it is an odd hope on your part for GenAI to never be able to write high quality software.

Zooming out, my bigger point was that this was a sci-fi book written by the person who coined the term and concept ‘Singularity’ and the series includes a malevolent murderous sentient AI virus (IIRC) and it included some reference to how programming was accomplished and yet still, given all that, there was no anticipation of even our nascent current GenAI coding capabilities.

[jacquesm]

I've yet to have my needs met by a GenAI-written script/program. Archaeologists tend to be a lot more precise in their statements, especially about what is speculation and what is not.

[toast0]

I mean, if you're willing to accept AI slop, that's fine. But if you're willing to accept AI slop, you'd probably be willing to accept human slop (at least if it claims to be AI) too, and then the job gets a lot easier.

[pbh101]

We’re talking about a sci-fi scenario that presupposed a lot of things but not anything that wrote code for you to the extent that society found value in dedicated code librarians. The state of AI today has nothing to do with re-inspecting that future world in light of the last 3 years of GenAI progress.

[resonious]

I work on regular web stuff and people already call themselves archeologists when doing routine tasks on our 15 year old codebase.

[EvanAnderson]

I feel like an archaeologist working on code I wrote myself 20+ years ago. I can imagine the feeling is stronger when it's somebody else's code.