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?