But once your artillery positions can't be protected from drones then its game over for sure.

Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.

Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.

This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".

A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.

Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.

AI is so many orders of magnitude more complex that the comparison is not really useful.

If I need a bridge, and there's a perfectly beautiful bridge one town over that spans the same distance - that's useless to me. Because I need my own bridge. Bridges are partly a design problem but mainly a build problem.

In software, if I find a library that does exactly what I need, then my task is done. I just use that library. Software is purely a design problem.

With agentic coding, we're about to enter a new phase of plenty. If everyone is now a 10x developer then there's going to be more software written in the next few years than in the last few decades.

That massive flurry of creativity will move the industry even further from the calm, rational, constrained world of engineering disciplines.

- the enemy was intermingled with the "friendly" civilians, and they couldn't be told apart, leading to everyone being treated brutally and potential friends becoming enemies

- the enemy was prepared to fight to the death, for years if need be, and knew they could outlast US public opinion

- the enemy knew they could prevail because of centuries of history defeating much larger opponents (in Vietnam's case, of them previously defeating France and China).

All of these same conditions would be present in a ground war in Iran, with some religious fanaticism thrown in on top.

A classic one is C++. Microcontrollers like esp32 cost about $10 these days, for a machine more capable than an early PC.

One downside though is that you typically need C++ to program them, and the barrier to entry with C++ is very high, especially for non-programmers.

LLMs remove that barrier so that anyone can create powerful embedded devices - programmed in C++ - without knowing anything about C++.

"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975)

Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction.

I learned IBM /360 assembler when I started in computers a long time ago. I haven't seen a line of assembler in many decades, but I'm sure it's a viable language still if you need it.

Java has won (alongside many other winners of course), now the AI drawbridge is being raised to stop new entrants and my pick is that Java will still be here in 50 years time, it's just no humans will be creating it.

If your argument is that you can't hope to close every door, then AI will make it easier to close all the doors in the future.

Instead, this should be handled not by fudging identity verification but by skipping it and maybe tagging the skip event with some verified identities of the people authorizing the skip.

When your business is pushing ads to people while they watch cat videos, then video processing software is your complement, and you want it to be as cheap as possible.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups.

Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again.

Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus.

For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.

For a lot of people (me included) the lack of integrity and the gaslighting is what has soured them on OpenAI, rather than them signing up to build surveillance and weaponry.

To non-US citizens, all AI companies are as dangerous as each other, OpenAI just really botched the optics here.