Don't you mean extinct?

> It is more ok to refuse to take dependencies now. It used to be the go-to solution to avoid writing anything moderately complex. As recently as this morning, I asked an LLM to write a Levenshtein distance function instead of adding a dependency to my project.

The trap here is that LLMs love to YOLO out reinvented wheels and that leads to a lot of verbosity and untested complexity. Levenshtein distance is one thing, but I've seen an LLM try to hand roll an ORM which obviously will lead to buggier code and a context window bloated with irrelevant noise. Better, as always, to let the ORM maintainer leverage LLMs for the more local issue.

Likewise - it's not just about generating production code faster; it's now feasible to create all kinds of experiments, test fixtures, visualizers, analyzers, and support software you never would have had time for before, which you can use to improve your process and create a better product.

I recently had to evaluate some data one of my coworkers had produced, to decide whether some process was going to be feasible. It would have taken probably a couple of weeks for me to dig through it all by hand, so he whipped up a quick little interactive web app that let me explore the data with all the connections and context visible, and I reviewed it much more quickly. A single-use application for a single user - what a luxury! - and it took less time to create than the time I saved by using it.

I will check in Monday morning on the result of an A/B test I set running over the weekend, comparing a reimplementation of a certain tool with its original. The test spins up AWS boxes, pulls code repos, compiles them, runs analysis, recovers from errors and maintains a retry queue, etc., etc., and ultimately collates the results and generates a report. I didn't write a line of this! I wouldn't have written anything nearly so sophisticated, and the results I'd have gotten would have been far less useful. But here we are: I tell the computer "make it so", and I get a really valuable test which runs itself while I enjoy my life, and we'll be able to switch to the new tool with confidence.

Yes, also the whole motivated reasoning part, where people are quite reasonably terrified of losing their jobs and having no income and so deny the possibility.

I think we tend to downplay the potential positives though. We may come to a point where we look back at the concept of work and see it as some kind of indentured servitude; the idea that you have to spent the majority of your waking hours serving someone else just to be able to have food and shelter is naturally repugnant.

Sure, many of us are fortunate enough to have jobs we enjoy, but everyone I’m sure has memories of jobs they hated and perhaps couldn’t leave because they needed the money. I hope we end up in a world where this is seen as a relic of a barbaric past.

> Rust, strong types, enums, fantastic interfaces, brevity.

That's not what suitable data structures/algorithms mean. What you stated are mere helpers and still pertains to the realms of coding, not design.

Coding isn't and never was the issue. It is a tool and not the intent. Think about what would stand universally true whether you use Go, C, JavaScript, Assembly,... The organization of data (information), and the process of transforming it (computation).

Those do not depends on code. We already have basic ones like the list, the map, the stack, the queue, the binary tree, the graphs,... But for any business domain, you can create more specific ones. And like the basic one, they do not depends on code. The code depends on them.

So writing code faster does not make the design better.

> Project Hail Mary was predominantly practical effects

Don't drink the Kool Aid. The studios love to make this sort of claim — recent examples include F1: The Movie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and you'll see interviews where the main actors say it was all real — but it's just marketing.

Project Hail Mary leans heavily on CG. For example, while they did hire a puppeteer (he ended up voicing the alien!) to control a neat physical puppet on set, almost all of it was replaced with CG in post production, and only used for reference. Corridor Crew has a great breakdown [1]. They frequently provide a good counterpoint against fraudulent "no CG" claims.

[1] https://youtu.be/l9zqIo8KtjI?is=e7-3Wz_mnMdl2Yp8