[echelon]

Billions of years of evolution and we increasingly understand what the genome does. And that's about as random as it gets.

I think we'll be fine.

This feels more like Y2K panic than grounded in truth. Senior software engineers guide these systems effectively today without creating a mess. I'm sure in some years agents will fill the role of maintainability engineer too. We are not special or irreplaceable.

It's not like we won't be spending an incredible amount of energy to overcome issues with understandably and maintenance. The sheer economic forces will absolutely will this problem solved. It must be solved, because trillions of dollars urgently want it to be solved. That's evolutionary pressure if I've ever seen it.

Also, we ceremoniously ascribe too much value to the software we create. With the exception of a few places, almost all of it gets replaced before our careers are over. At the end of the day, business automation is value creation. It's not sacred. It has a finite life, and then it too dies.

The software artifact just needs to facilitate economic/interest flux long enough to be useful, then it can be replaced with something better or more relevant.

[npodbielski]

I think we are talking about different timespans. I am talking about change in the world after decades of something like that happening. How those Senior Engineers will know how good software looks like if they would never write it themeselves? Imagine looking at someone driving a car for 20 years. Will it be enough for you to drive a car yourself?

Thinking about that always makes me think about Foundation, The Merchant Princess. Mallow travels to the edge of the Empire to look how things are on one of those worlds. He learns that there is the cast of the tech priests and those people have absolutely no idea how those devices actually work.

He said:

> The machines work from generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burned out

It was a sign of severe decline of the entire empire. People had no idea how devices work and they would not be able to reproduce it or even repair if one would broke.

It was recurring premise of civilisation decline in the series: no proper maintaince and people loosing interests and knowledge how things are done and how they work.

I just wondering if this is not the same thing starting to happining know with our civilisation.

And evolution? Evolution means mass extinction of species and its normal. I am not sure about you but I would rather avoid any mass extinction regarding humanity.

[echelon]

> I think we are talking about different timespans. I am talking about change in the world after decades of something like that happening. How those Senior Engineers will know how good software looks like if they would never write it themeselves?

How will we know what good software looks like if we no longer write assembler?

> Imagine looking at someone driving a car for 20 years. Will it be enough for you to drive a car yourself?

You don't have to drive stick to be able to drive.

Whatever the economically important functions are, the miracle of capitalism will find a way to staff it and solve it.

People fill all the gaps. No problem goes uninvestigated, no opportunity goes ignored.

At the end of the day we're delivering value. We'll be judged on value creation, and that'll map itself to whatever the tools of the day happen to be.