The Value of Things

I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before [0]. With the latest crop of foundational coding models and harnesses, and more progress on the way, I'm beginning to wonder if it will matter? If there's a future where agents are designing the code, implementing the code, and reading and reviewing the code... At that point the code is no longer the thing. "Software engineers" will continue to sit at the interface of product and software, but the software will be writing itself. Of course there will be a need for programmers who can actually read and write computer code, the same way there's a need for Fortran and compiler devs today.

The skill that all software engineers will need to learn, regardless of level, is how to leverage commoditized reasoning to build products effectively.

- how to design systems declaratively and in terms of requirements and constraints

- how to configure the systems in such a way that they're automatically testable end-to-end

- how to move tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the context (all of our meetings will be transcribed; questions from the agent will be generated during the meeting resolve ambiguity; the agent will be an omnipresent attendee in all meetings: "Agent: The topic you're discussing overlaps with what Sally said three days ago when she met with Mike. They covered xyz..."; companies that follow remote work best practices will have an advantage here)

- how to allocate and orchestrate teams of people and agents

[0]: https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai

They talked about it with knitting: obviously, buying yarn is a time-saving efficiency compared to spinning your own, but that didn't destroy the meaning of the gift. Nevertheless, if I spent time spinning my own yarn and gifting it to my mother, I bet she would find it meaningful.

Similarly, they talk about how they could use a mechanical knitter to save time, but that would reduce the meaning. I think that depends. If I designed a beautiful pattern and then used a mechanical knitter to create a blanket, I bet my mom would find it meaningful.

The epiphany is that meaning doesn't come from how hard I work. It comes from personal relationship and how my actions interact with that relationship. If I knew my mom was looking for a specific, somewhat rare purse, and one day I happened to find it at a yard sale and give it to her, that would be a meaningful gift, regardless of how much effort it took me.

Meaning is not an intrinsic quality of objects. It is not an arrangement of atoms or a quantum field. You can't see meaning in a microscope. Meaning is only in our heads. And because it is only in our heads, AI can't destroy it.

AI is just a tool, like a mechanical knitter or a jackhammer. Sure, maybe not all tools are equally useful for creating meaning, but no one ever worried that meaning was under threat because jackhammers got invented. AI is no different.

The purse can be meaningful because of the implication that you remembered a small detail for an extended period of time. “Aww you remembered”. The AI equivalent would be to ask your personal assistant to find the purse for you and you keep it hidden for an extended period to pretend you remembered.

In both cases your mom will be touched by the gesture.

The effort itself has the be meaningful! It can't be effort for effort's sake. The effort has to produce something that could not be obtained without effort. But that means it's not the effort that counts--it's getting something that could not be obtained otherwise.