The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.
Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.
In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?
I agree with pretty much all your points. I use AI every day to do the typing for me, but not the thinking. It’s saved me from mistakes and makes me far more productive. However there is no way it could replace what I do.
It’s probably going to take a few years, but eventually I think devs will finally realize that the typing is the thinking.
There are projects I worked on 5+ years ago that I can still describe in intimate detail. I remember the design decisions, I remember the concessions I had to make for technical or business reasons, I remember they connect to other systems, etc. Then by contrast I have code I wrote with Claude ~2 months ago and I can barely remember a single fucking thing about it… I did all the same planning and made all the same kinds of decisions, the only difference is that I didn’t write the actual code.
And that makes sense. When you physically engage with the code by manually typing, you’re creating connections in your brain that you don’t get just from reviewing it. It’s exactly the same reinforcement mechanism you get from taking physical notes during a lecture versus just passively listening. Physical engagement builds memory and sharpens understanding.
Two or three years from now, when all of the projects minted in the '23-'26 era have aged into ‘legacy’ status and the AI-generated technical debt has been left to proliferate unchecked, things are going to start breaking in ways that the LLMs won’t be able to reason their way out of. Maybe they’ll be able to ‘fix’ bugs as they pop up, but in slopified code fixing something in component A is inevitably going to break something in component B, and fixing something in component B will break component C, etc. Eventually you’ll end up with a disgusting, agentic ouroboros of regressions, and the only devs left in the industry will be wishing they hadn’t mortgaged all of their intelligence on short-term productivity gains — most of which only benefited the shitty tech companies that were so desperate to replace them.
I think you have a very valid point. That’s why I have increased all of my documentation of everything I am doing considerably. I always document the “why” of the code instead of the what, and do as much of it as I can inline instead of a separate repository.
That is true for me and most of the best devs I know, but I don’t think that is true for most devs in general. I think a lot of people already “type and forget” their code and so what they are losing by letting Claude type for them is something they never had in the first place.
And the world always adapts to the majority’s habits. If you do a research into what you lose by not typing your code, it won’t show this phenomenon you describe if it only happens with a subset of developers.
The typing is the means of communicating the thinking. If you are “doing the thinking” and the AI is doing the “typing” then either you are instructing the AI to generate additional content without original thought (which is a waste of your time, the AI’s time, and the reader’s time), or the AI is actually doing some of the thinking (in which case your job can be automated).
The programers use AI to make art. The artists use AI to write. The writers use AI to program. I think we’re all in denial by both just how much our own value is at risk, and also the real value of AI (less than advertised). A bit paradoxical.