Not to be a jerk, but what if I told you there was a raging debate about widgets vs wodgets in the last 6 months and, although it seems pretty clear that widgets were being adopted across the industry at large, there was an ever growing sentiment that wodgets were actually preferred and the market was going to reverse itself, any day now?

I can’t really point to any evidence of this because the wodget people have stopped posting about it and every month the cost of widgets keeps going down while they simultaneously get better and there’s so much capital and talent being thrown at widgets that it’s impossible to think a wholesale reversal could even be possible. Would you tell me that, “trust me, bro” is not really an argument?

Who said anything about a wholesale reversal?

All these things can be true simultaneously:

* AI has wholly taken over the corporate world

* Programmers can now generate massive amounts of code

* This massive productivity boost is, oddly enough, not reflected in consumer products at all

* LLM use hampers software development at its current level of complexity (because AI is incapable of independent abstraction and simplification)

* Programmers are deskilling en masse and turning into managers (without admitting it to themselves)

* The externalities of LLM use remain the same (and, to an extent, can’t actually be fixed)

* There will always be programmers who code by hand, even in a professional capacity — and it’s quite likely they’ll be the ones dragging the industry forward (up the ladder of abstraction)

Maybe I misunderstood you. I thought that after the sentiment grew ever stronger that there was an “and then something happens” implied. I assumed you meant reversal.