They lied to you. Building software is hard

Particularly when the human acts as the router/architect.

However, I've found Claude Code and Co only really work well for bootstrapping projects.

If you largely accept their edits unchanged, your codebase will accrue massive technical debt over time and ultimately slow you down vs semi-automatic LLM use.

It will probably change once the approach to large scale design gets more formalized and structured.

We ultimately need optimized DSLs and aggressive use of stateless sub-modules/abstractions that can be implemented in isolation to minimize the amount of context required for any one LLM invocation.

Yes, AI will one shot crappy static sites. And you can vibe code up to some level of complexity before it falls apart or slows dramatically.

> All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? Unless it is more than 9/10 of all effort, shrinking all the accidental activities to zero time will not give an order of magnitude improvement.

AI, the silver bullet. We just never learn, do we?

That's something that seems to eat up AAA games, each person they add adds less of a person due to communication effects and inefficiencies. That and massive amounts of created artwork/images/stories.

There are a lot of indie game studios that make games much more complicated than what was in the 90s, and have a lot less people than AAA teams.

And ya, tons of memory has unlocked tons of capability.

Building a plane is easier than building software. That's why they don't have bootcamps for building planes or becoming a rocket engineer. Building rockets or planes as an engineer is a breeze so there's no point in making a bootcamp.

That's the awesome thing about being a swe, it's so hard that it's beyond getting a university degree, beyond requiring higher math to learn. Basically the only way to digest the concept of software is to look at these "tutorials" on the internet or have AI vibe code the whole thing (which shows how incredibly hard it is, just ask chatGPT).

My friend became a rocket engineer and he had to learn calculus, physics and all that easy stuff which university just transferred into his brain in a snap. He didn't have to go through an internet tutorial or bootcamp.

The essence: query all the users within a certain area and do it as fast as possible

The accident: spending an hour to survey spatial tree library, another hour debating whether to make our own, one more hour reading the algorithm, a few hours to code it, a few days to test and debug it

Many people seem to believe implementing the algorithm is "the essence" of software development so they think the essence is the majority. I strongly disagree. Knowing and writing the specific algorithm is purely accidental in my opinion.