Greg Knauss wrote a blog post that is wistful and at times poetic, with bits of tragic humor that can’t quite lighten the feeling that the ground is falling away beneath us:
What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.
I genuinely feel bad for programmers who feel this way. It’s destabilizing and scary to lose what you love. This is a major disruption in software development, and it will create a rift in society as AI spreads to more professions. I’m a little worried about how we handle this.
But I have a different perspective: what software can be built now that wasn’t possible before? I’m not talking about building faster than before. I mean new features that were technically impossible until LLMs, or even old features that now have new significance.
That’s what I’m looking for. If all we see is the work we currently do being replaced and done better by robots, we’ll miss everything that will make software companies successful in the future — a thousand ideas that could improve people’s lives in small ways.
Most of my blog posts about AI over the last couple of years have been to try to reason this out. I’ve been working on Micro.blog for about a decade and plan to work on it for many years to come. That means always reevaluating what we do, comparing it with our founding principles, finding what makes us uniquely human — our voice, our creativity — and trusting it will endure when everything changes.
