> The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.

That’s putting it mildly. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world. I think these people will have close to no understanding of how computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier) developers who grew up having to interact with computers primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least have some understanding of memory management, low-level programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who’ve only ever known computers through extremely high level interfaces like iPads.

I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers, networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and written have been used by hundreds of millions of people.

Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still released much better software than you faster. By the time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has already iterated 100 times and found product market fit.

Casey Muratori says that every programmer should understand how computers work and if you don't understand how computers work you can't be a good programmer.

I might not be a good programmer but I've been a very productive one.

Someone who is good at writing code isn't always good at making money.

AI slop books made more money than JK Rowling, too.

Maybe in the future, yea. Most likely not because creating books is much easier now but total reading time can't increase nearly as fast. More books chasing the same amount of reading time.

To be fair, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they were better than barfs onto a page. She's not exactly Tolkien

Problem with much of this talk is receipts are always nowhere to be found.

But I don't see any receipts from the opposite side either.

You don't see any good software made by people who know how computers work?

You don't see any good software made by people who don't know how CPUs, GPUs, networking work at a deep level?

> I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world.

we only have to look today at how different software quality is compared to the "old days" - when compilers were not as good, and people wrote in assembly by hand.

Old software were fast and optimized. Hand written assembly used minimal resources. Today, people write bloated electron webapps packaged into a bundle.

And yet, look who is surviving in the competitive land of software darwinian natural selection?

Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code. The thing is that I have experience to judge my work. Greenhorns can’t and this will lead to crapification of the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice. Sometimes it’s very useful, sometimes it’s complete hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive exact solution. But that comes from my previous experience. Without experience it’s a macabre guessing game.