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by atomic128 112 days ago
Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions.

Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.

Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.

This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.

That era is ending.
2 comments
rixed 112 days ago
That era ended 20 years ago. It's called "industrialization", a process that has happened to many other crafts in the past. AI is just the latest blow.
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Razengan 112 days ago
...is that comment written by an LLM?

Human programmers are frequently hamstrung by human politics and economies.

Hell, even major developers like Google and Facebook still fight against letting iPhone apps run on iPad, for example. YouTube still doesn't support Picture-in-Picture on iPad.

It took YEARs for some big apps to just adopt Dark Mode. The best paid programmers on the planet, wtf?

If the power of AI isn't artificially crippled I could be able to just say "Make me a native app for browsing {DumbWebsiteThatRefusesToProvideAnApp}" or "Fix HN's crap formatting" and just get on with my life the way I want without having to beg or fight our Corpo Gods.

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