my sentiments exactly
In my 25+ yr career in (systems) software engineering, I can count on one hand the number of real paradigm shifts I’ve seen:
- Ubiquitous automated testing, eg unit tests
- Modern network routing fabrics, which made intra-DC bandwidth effectively infinite and intra-DC latency effectively zero for most workloads, Patterson notwithstanding
- SSDs, which combined the speed of memory with the capacity of disk. No more counting seeks!
- Cloud infrastructure
- AI coding
I’m not saying anything new by including AI coding here. I don’t fully know what its long term effects will be. I doubt many of us do. And the industry is obviously far from perfect.
But coming from a late adopter, and a skeptic in general, it’s still very clearly a big deal. And I don’t see those often.
…this produces what I will call the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness:
- Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers!
- This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs.
- Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes.
- Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs!
- Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents
- I need an agent framework
- I can have my agent write an agent framework!
- Return to step 1
It’s actually alarming how many friends and respected peers I’ve lost to this cycle already.
Best paper title I’ve seen in a long time:
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog
first law of thermodynamics
conservation of energy
🤝
double entry bookkeeping
conservation of money
It’s VCs’ job to predict the future in all sorts of directions, and be extremely confident about those predictions, and also be wrong 9 out of 10 times. Remember that next time you hear a VC say…anything.
(Not that VCs are dumb, or delusional, or malicious! Far from it. But still.)
