We're moving into the 'industrial age of software'. You exact issue, of bespoke, well thought out and well-crafted code is one that craftsmen felt at the beginning of the industrial age. Now, parts are designed and churned out by machines that no one sees or cares about (generally speaking). This is where we are going with software, and production at a truly industrial scale has its place.
And so does well-crafted bespoke software.
The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.
I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.
This is like arguing we should only have manual looms because the mechanical looms suppress wages and destroy the livelihoods of those expert loom operators.
The tech is here. We can fight it, or adapt and embrace it.
If previous examples from the industrial revolution are anything to go by, fighting automation is a losing battle.
Difference is that those tools modernised the work and actually created jobs. The ultimate aim of these AI sociopaths is to remove all work in all areas so they can hoover up all the money and let people starve.
But, there is plenty of open source stuff out there to enable people to have their own models, running on their own hardware. Business does not need to go to the big 3.
Business doesn't need to go to the big 3, but it will. The big companies will ensure that smaller, specialised or open models get restricted by laws paid for by their lobbying budgets, so that they can pull up the ladder after them and solidify their position. They've invested billions and will never allow the world become some tech utopia where we all have a personalised free AI in our pocket, they will guarantee their own dominance.
I'd be curious to hear more about your work on the 'Sovereign AI Stack'. I'm also working on a project that prioritizes governance and verification and I'd love to compare notes.
Importing git history is ugly but do-able. I had to do that at a previous job (splitting a git repo in two pieces or importing commit history from SVN).
I can take a look and try to create a PR around this if there is interest.
My father still has one of these in orange and white. I remember when I was a little child and he would start it up, I could feel the concussion of the exhaust in my chest.
I've been neck deep in a personal project since January that heavily leverages LLMs for the coding.
Most of my time has been spent fitting abstractions together, trying to find meaningful relationships in a field that is still somewhat ill-defined. I suppose I could have thrown lots of cash at it and had it 'done' in a weekend, but I hate that idea.
As it stands, I know what works and what doesn't (to the degree I can, I'm still learning, and I'll acknowledge I'm not super knowledgeable in most things) but I'm trying to apply what I know to a domain I don't readily understand well.
I've found that value is largely derived from polish and vision.
It's easy to prompt some stuff into existence over a weekend. It is hard to polish it, fix bugs, have tidy UX, and so on. There's this meme going around (maybe from that Silicon Valley show?) where the grey-beard says he is valued for his taste and his conviction in that taste. This is -- fortunately or not -- reality.
Vision and taste won't get you the whole way, but they are a huge part of the equation. This is why Apple, for example, was so successful under Jobs: he had vision, and he had good taste.
I agree, and for those who would counter “just use AI to polish”, those who use AI to avoid doing the work of building something are likewise going to avoid doing the work to polish it, if they even possess the taste required to do so.
And so does well-crafted bespoke software.
The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.
I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.
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