The humans are not disappearing

AI might be getting better, quickly. But the people making the software are not going away, same as when compilers came along, they didn't go away.

We just wrote more, better software, in a different way. No different.

Nolan Lawson:

We mourn our craft

I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off o…

Read the Tea LeavesNolan Lawson

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.
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If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig, a curio for future generations.

Maybe I'll miss it. Maybe not. I've made a point of being forward facing my whole life - sometimes to my and others detriment. So we'll see.

And Grady Booch on the Oxide and Friends podcast

So I kind of grew up with C++ and vice versa. But now I would observe that we are in the third golden age of software engineering. It's not because of things like like Claude. I think we've been into it for a while. Why?

Because the abstraction has shifted again with the rise of distributed systems, with the rise of the Internet, and primarily with the rise of packages and platforms, all of a sudden, we're not dealing with building systems out of levels of classes. We're dealing with levels of whole frameworks. Oh, I need to do some sort of messaging, then I'll use this package. I need to do this kind of UI thing. I'll use this.

I need to do visualization. I'll use D3. So all of a sudden, the level of distraction has moved up for us. And now as a software engineer, a lot of what we end up doing or some people who build these, some people who maintain them, but systems engineering is largely figuring out what those right pieces are and orchestrating them so they work well together. That's the third golden age in which we're in.

And then I would observe things like claude, they are a a symptom of that golden age. We've had a need to increase the velocity and reduce the friction so they come in at the right time, not unlike what happened with the generation of CASE tools in the second generation, second golden age, not unlike the rise of compilers and higher order languages in the first generation. Now, what does it mean? And I've often said this, I believe things like Claude and the like will change the nature of software engineering just as much as did the rise of compilers. It moves up the level of abstraction and actually makes it possible for us and desirable for us to build more software.

And therefore, the human is not disappearing. We've just moved up another ratchet of level of abstraction. So this is an exciting time, quite frankly.

100% this. The abstraction is moving, as it has moved many times before.

And Grady on Pragmatic Engineer

Similar, but just as good.