There will never be a shortage of people who use the wrong tool for the job, and/or just use the tool wrong. Thus, unless bots 100% take over, there will probably be a decent number of jobs in cleaning fucked up systems.

"All repairs tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing the original design flaws; more and more is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes."

Microsoft Windows in a nutshell (even before AI)

I predict it could cost as much as $150 Billion!

Do I hear $200B? We're making shit up - go large!

Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.

I'm going back from before he used Bitkeeper. There was a long period of time he didn't want to use source control at all. Bitkeeper wasn't used by him until the 2000s.

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

If productivity is improving then a company will typically make/sell more product, not cut staff.

My day job is a (saas) app that's about 20 years old and has been worked on continuously by a team that has varied in size from about 5 to now about 15. It is complicated and connects to several external services. There are parts of the app that are too hairy for AI to reason about. But we have found, recently, that AI is surprisingly good at explaining how some rather complicated (but well written) parts of the app work.
The 2-3 really hairy parts of the app are written in an arbitrarily complicated way that I would never have used and long to rewrite - but they work. Nobody on the team is happy with it - and there is no corporate memory of anyone being happy working with these parts.
We have exceptional test coverage (>95% by lines), so it's just a matter of time before we decide to lay out an AI agent team to rewrite some of the horrible stuff in a way that is much more palatable to both human and agent. This is not something I would have suggested as possible 4-6 months ago.

I'm not sure how to answer that question. My flip answer is "the usual way." But nothing about software is the usual anymore.

100% of the code that .. makes up this project is code that I did not write. But I absolutely told AI what I wanted and in many cases *how* I wanted it. And any code that had "interesting" design elements is code that I reviewed and in some cases told AI to change. Where interesting refers to meaningful architectural decisions.

At this point it is a very light project - somewhat less that 10K lines of code. It is in its minimal viable product phase - and I imagine it will grow to be more than 15 or even 20K LOC. Eventually becoming projects on 3 distinct platforms and becoming substantially larger.

All of which is ridiculous. Fewer than 200 prompts so far, I'm sure. Maybe fewer than 100.

I've got a black swan for ya!
I just shipped software that AI wrote [practically] entirely that I would not have shipped otherwise. I don't think I'm the only one.

the nuclear power industry "has a remarkably skilled but quickly shrinking workforce tasked with keeping old reactors online and possibly starting up new ones to meet surging demand for electricity,"

Maybe stop harassing scientists and experts so that they don't flee overseas.

I like this stuff but...

• Blade Runner (film not book) - 1982, 44 years old
• Godzilla - 1954, 72 years old
• Star Trek - 1967, 59 years old
• Star Wars - 1978, 48 years old

Even the Marvel stuff dates back to the 60s. I think pop culture is a bit stuck in a rut - there are good sci fi series out there, and new ones need to emerge as major cultural touchpoints as well. It's all feeling a bit retread at the moment.

Ballcoin will be a thing

> I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

My observation is that it's quite often true. If our observations differ, so be it.

The Soviets appeared to concede at that point. They cancelled their manned lunar program.