dogcomplex

You are essentially describing an over-eager developer having to run decisions up the chain of command to senior devs / product owners / company execs. I assure you, every one of those roles is being trained on to balance their own wide breadth of concerns, and is unlikely to advise something like a live rewrite of a production app or an entire product pivot - unless it actually made sense from an economics/management perspective. Every step bounded by its role and responsibilities.

Turtles all the way up, and all the way down. AI getting this good at coding means it's a hop skip and a jump away from being this good at every white collar role.

Programming with AIs requires new architectural structures designed around the all-too-small context windows of the AIs themselves. Highly modular, highly semantic, highly traceable, good at deleting and refactoring/removing things they no longer need, good at identifying the core truths/principles/designs they need to uphold, good at recognizing what is mere interface from architecture from data.

This is the great orchestrator game. It might be the last game. I dont think it lands precisely in our previous "best practices" though, and I don't think it's trivial to solve for. I also don't think it's going to be a human-centric design. I think we're generally better off rethinking fundamentals and designing from the ground up on this one. I think it's also a lot of fun to start thinking in these new ways.

There will always be programming, just like there will always be oil painters and historians. But this is about to get industrialized into stable emerging factory forms, and there's a lot of ways to design those right now. And after that us artisans will either need to find new unfinished aspects of programming-like design or retire. At least take solace that the rest of the world will basically simultaneously be doing so too.

If you care about architecture and principles, the AI is excellent in architecting around that goal too and/or helping you articulate your own intuitions. You just need to be willing to sacrifice code delivery speed. It's far from an either/or.

Yes but those are all semantic tasks which can be done and understood in time by the next iteration of models training at that meta-level of architectural analysis.

AI deeply understands what Bun, Zig and Rust are, how they work, can conceive of the before and after architecture (probably the hard step here), can conceive of the goal of the rewrite, and can verify (using Lean and machine-checked proofs of the before and after expected states) the final result.

They just needed us to ask. Build a sufficiently general research program that can find and iterate on ideas, and it will do the asking itself.

Dream up ideas for proofs by Dawn, prove them by Day, decide which ones matter by Dusk, and disprove them by Night.

It sure takes a whole lot less wealth to access skill than it did before. And those with skill tended to be pretty wealthy already.

Been a whole lot longer since their last genocide

Nonetheless, would still trust Claude to be generally more reliably competent in a random area of software engineering than the average professional. Sure they might still be better in a particular area of their expertise, but we've all had to play the imposter before on the stuff we care less about and figure it out as we go. AIs are still inferior sometimes but usually a decent 7/10+ on most topics - which really fills the gap.

I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations that top management is going to reap the rewards of these AI capabilities we get a whole lot more comfortable with just doing the full business stack - including management, sales, branding, etc - and hierarchical structures crumble into flat collectives of do-everything true-generalist programmers.

That's a roundabout way of saying it makes software development easier. Perhaps even a 180.

But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.

I think this is a very reasonable middle-of-the-road AI take and our likely future. Just with the caveat that there's still a major threshold being hit here where we jump up to a new casual capabilities class where it becomes silly not to use AI for the majority of work, but there are still some high-intricacy problems which become much more load bearing than they ever were before and our new abstraction level doubles down on those.

I would like to submit that the high-intricacy work congregates in Protocols themselves, and we start seeing the cycles of development and all the ways to direct AIs, programs, inter-person/inter-company interactions, etc etc all as types of protocol design - and studying those rules of interaction themselves becomes the new job of a programmer (systems architecture). What used to be hard rules and deterministic programs becomes soft self-governing tendencies and probabilistic behavior that can nonetheless be managed and bounded with the right system, but it's new and weird and more akin to management or herding cats than architecture. This is still very different from what most of us were working on before AI, but it's still familiar - especially to those who worked on internet protocols, or defensive UX design around users, physical engineering systems, or team management. Less programming languages, more - control theory, flows and throttles, quality control, design theory, etc. And clearly the field is still wide open as everyone seems to be experimenting with their own take on the AI orchestrator.

It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.

This. AI can, should, and will erode all legacy companies into intelligent utilities - with an end state of nearly-free open source utilities.

Anyone concerned with concentrations of power and abuse of AI should be focusing on getting open source work to keep pace with decentralizing that power into accessible free tools for the masses.

That is the hope and faith. MechaHitler definitely tested the waters. Lets hope full alignment is impossible, because otherwise perfect billionaire thought slaves are still happening.