I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th one of them for X dollars?"
Already was well before AI, the difference now is that a few big AI providers risk becoming the ultimate rent-seekers that will increasingly capture all of the value of that commodified knowledge whether the original knowledge generators want that or not. There is no opt out, everything will be vacuumed up into the machine mind.
This will almost certainly lead to vastly increased amounts of wealth inequality (on top of the already unsustainable levels we have today) and possibly a very messy societal disintegration (this is theoretically avoidable, but I am not convinced it is practically avoidable given our current socioeconomic/political realities).
And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history.
So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.
It started before that. When assemblers came out, (some) programmers worried about losing touch with the machine if they didn't have to know the instructions in octal.
Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have.
For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.
I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.
The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.
So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.
So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
> So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.
And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
And to take the analogy even further, I'm sure there will be a subset of people who develop really strong opinions about a particular toolchain or workflow. Like how we have people who specialize in 70s diesel trucks or 90-00s JDM sports cars, there'll likely be programmers who are SMEs at updating COBAL to Rust using Claude.
I am pretty sure network knowledge and all those things are still necessary for people running data centers and really big computers and I imagine we will build a lot more of that.
Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.
I seem to recall a lot more hype for these companies than people saying it won't work. You seem to be cherry picking from the naysayers of the time, but not the broad consensus.
I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th one of them for X dollars?"
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