When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he could not have predicted the teleprompter. Now that code is easy to generate, it’s plausible that we will use much, much more of it than before.

It’s also a bit ironic to imagine that we’re at the end of new software ideas on a site owned(?) by YC.

it's also plausible that with an ability to generate as much code as we want with little effort, we will quickly discover how much code we actually need, and then plateau at that point.

Personally, I think we've already reached that point.

Even at YC, I have not really seen any startup doing anything interesting where their main value prop is enabled by new proprietary code that does stuff no one else can already do.

We have more code than we need. Proof for me is every "smart" device that worked better before we put a computer in it.

Exactly, this is the true problem with the world today: too much code.

Are teleprompters a net positive achievement? They were needed for live television, they will be superseded I guess by AI generated news avatars. And 24-hour news coverage is in the business of generating content non-stop, to sell advertisements, regardless if there are newsworthy events or not, the machine never stops producing.

> There’s nothing new left to discover.

It's the end of history. What could we possibly discover about a series of technologies that are already nearly 100 years old now?

I've heard people say that various things are "solved" now because of LLMs too -- programming included. This implies we've "solved" thinking. I'm worried about these sentiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history

Why did we even need bridges in the first place

Mature tech evolves more slowly. Think about cars, there's nothing new about them any more. But wait, what about electic cars? Aren't they a new thing? And driverless cars. And soon flying taxis. Automobiles are an old invention but they are still evolving.

The reason the evolution of cars has slowed down so much is mostly regulatory compliance.

With the current ongoing revolution in home manufacturing (starting with 3D printing; currently there is a lot of work done in home CNC machining), it would be easily possible to get a huge leap towards "print your own car".

The reason why you see nothing of this is basically red tape.

Well, a short time ago somebody made the first LLM. Was that the end of it?