We mourn our craft

I can't explain it in a way that will make sense or base it on any data, but I do see that moat all the time. For example, Microsoft / GitHub somehow taking a 3 year lead (with Co-Pilot) and losing it to Cursor in months, and still catching up.

Microsoft / GitHub have no real limitation to doing better/faster, maybe it's the big company mentality, moving slower, fear of taking risks where you have a lot to lose, or when the personal incentive for a product manager at github is much much lower than the one of a co-founder of a seed stage startup. Co-Pilot was a microscopic line item for Microsoft as a whole, and probably marginal for GitHub too. But for Cursor, this was everything.

This is why we have innovation, if mega-corps didn't promote people to their level of incompetence, if bureaucracy and politics didn't ruin every good thing, if private equity didn't bleed every beloved product to the last penny, we would have no chance for any innovation or entrepreneurship because these company have practically close to unlimited resources.

So my only conclusion from this is - the moat is sometimes just the will to do better, to dare to say, I don't care if someone has a billion dollars to compete with me, I'll still do better.

In other words, don't underestimate the power of big companies to make colossal mistakes and build crappy products. My only worry is, that AI would not make the same mistakes an we'll basically have a handful of companies in the world (the makers of models, owner of tokens e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAi), if AI led product teams will be able to not make the mistakes of modern corporations of ruining everything good that they got in their hands, then maybe software related entrepreneurship will be dead.

Something I'm finding odd is this seemingly perpetually repeating claim that the latest thing that came out actually works, unlike the last thing that obviously didn't quite work.

Then next month, of course, latest thing becomes last thing, and suddenly it's again obvious that actually it didn't quite work.

It's like running on a treadmill towards a dangling carrot or something. It's simultaneously always here in front of our faces but also not here in actual hand, obviously.

The tools are good and improving. They work for certain things, some of the time, with various need for manual stewarding in the hands of people who really know what they're doing. This is real.

But it remains an absolutely epic leap from here to the idea that writing code per se is a skill nobody needs any more.

More broadly, I don't even really understand what that could possibly mean on a practical level, as code is just instructions for what the software should do. You can express instructions on a higher level, and tooling keeps making that more and more possible (AI and otherwise), but in the end what does it mean to abstract fully away from the instruction in the detail? It seems really clear that will never be able to result in getting software that does what you want in a precise way rather than some probabilistic approximation which must be continually corrected.

I think the real craft of software such that there is one is constructing systems of deterministic logic flows to make things happen in precisely the way we want them to. Whatever happens to tooling, or what exactly we call code or whatever, that won't change.

A non-deterministic, slow, pay to use, compiler for a language that is not precise enough for software. What an amazing abstraction!

I am feeling this loss. I spent most of mu career scrupulously avoiding leadership positions because what I really like is the simple joy of making things with my own two hands.

Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most people are nowadays.

And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are - like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least, soon enough it won’t be. I can fret about deskilling all I like, but it seems that soon enough these skills won’t be particularly valuable except as a form of entertainment.

Perhaps the coding agents won’t be able to make certain things or use certain techniques. That was the case for textile manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we see it in each others’ work.

It’s not a terrible future, I suppose, in à long enough view. The world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and other similar points in history, not until after we get through another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won’t start quite so many wars while they enjoy their power trips.

> Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.

Always has been. (Meme)