Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. I don’t full agree with the title, but I think it’s quite plausible that technology as we know it is going sigmoidal. We still use trains, and we’d rather have Shinkansen as our national system than Amtrak, but the railroad industry stopped being where all the talent wanted to be 100+ years ago, and what makes a good or bad train system no longer comes down to steam engines, but resources and politics. Softwar…
If the future of software development is more collaborative with the end user, that sounds like the beginning not the end. Nobody liked the steel tycoon era of railroads either. We were already almost there decades ago with plugin architecture. LLMs slot very well into that kind of customization. It doesn't change the social order, nor kill software though.
My first 'Programming' Job was actually doing automation for CAD drafters. They would ask about a feature, I'd have to estimate the effort to implement versus how much time it would save over 1 or 2 years. If I could implement it quicker enough over the estimated time savings, I got the green light to code it instead of doing CAD work.
Which, frankly was good experience for me; I was translating semi-to-barely-technical people's requests into requirements.
Skip to today, I can have a complaint about what someone has to do manually, and can easily turn it into what's necessary to get Copilot/Claude to spit out a usable, simple tool to automate the needs of many teams. Sure, it's not always super fancy stuff, but 30-60 minutes of prompting/reviewing/testing the results can save 5-10x that time if not more for teams.