"It simply does not add up that someone who lacks purely technical skills in an area can make good decisions."

I've been thinking about this and your related points, and I've been (with growing concern) instinctively in agreement.

Another analogy has been coming up. I started programming (as a kid) in the late 1970s, first with BASIC (of course) but pretty quickly moved to machine language for obvious performance reasons, and then to C, followed by many other languages. In the late 1980s, at university, I learned proper assembly language, and used it quite a bit.

Back then, I was pretty good with assembly/machine language. Not super star or expert level, but comfortably solid. Since then though I've spent very little time at that low level.

Granted, such early exposure and experience has been a pretty big fairly indirect benefit. But over the years, I've met and worked with many really smart, productive people who have never had any experience at that low level, and that lack was rarely noticeable.

For any given 'layer of abstraction', there is some use in being familiar with the lower layers. I think, in general, the closer the lower layer is, the more useful the knowledge is. For example, how useful is deep knowledge of CPU microcode to a Java programmer? Perhaps some, but not a lot.

In the tech world, GenAI is likely to push most everyone quite a ways up the tower of abstractions. We're in the middle of that right now, and it certainly feels pretty alarming to me.

The biggest uncertainty that comes into my mind is how insanely fast this change is coming upon us. My crawl up the abstraction tower happened over the course of about 12 or so years, from machine language/assembly to C then to Perl then to many other things. In retrospect, that felt pretty fast.

GenAI is seemingly pushing us in that direction many times more quickly.

Nobody has good answers for any of these things. It's a folly to think someone else has it figured out.

The pipeline problem is already well-discussed. Just learn the stuff even though the AI can do it, so you can acquire that supposedly valuable judgment. My concern is that if the only things left are the subjective and the social, only people who talk a big game are going to be valued.

How do you become a baker, in a world of bread factories.

I think the answer lies in baking the good old fashioned way and ignoring the factories.

For certain functionality, we import libraries. For others, we've handwritten solutions. Even so — sometimes we have to crack open the repo for a library to really dig in to what's going on. That seems to go for domain experts as well.

I think we've always been working with the scenarios of what's solved for us and what we need to solve manually. AI is certainly not an abstraction layer, but there are ways to use it where you are still driving, learning, and shipping.

1) I guess the robots extract the metal too?

2) The system has determined that you need 10% calories if you sit on a bench all day instead of playing football.

3) The system has determined you don't need to watch TV/YouTube/Netflix, so that energy will be redirected for more food production. [You still get 90% anyway.]

4) Distribute (step 6) is not necessary. Please go to the queue for the two daily meals. [Estimated time, 6 hours each.]

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Programming is a vocation. It became a career because of sheer luck.

what makes you think companies will do it the "old way" when the new way is much more economically viable?

I'm not saying this as in I love it but I just don't see how we'd go back

This is exactly correct. The whole point of software is to precisely build what is intended.

The perception of the quality of the result is relative to the original requirements and expectations. It shouldn't be surprising that people who are ignorant of industry specs and who have very low standards are impressed. They've always been impressed by any software at all if it scratches their immediate itch.

The bigger threat to employment is the same as it's always been: the employer's wishes. Many of those wishes are not out of the kindness of their heart. They are forced by regulations and contractual obligation.

What we actually saw was an initial dismissal of how deep that specification can/should go. I'm expecting there to be a wave of people pushing for reform instead when they realize LLMs aren't moving the needle much. That's good. That's where all this energy belongs. We always want better ideas. It doesn't change the fact that humans still need to implement the new specs when they're new. Ah, you say, then the bots take over? No. As ever, that's just packaged as a standard library. There's always another new layer to think about integrating it with which again requires a human in the loop.

What's most surprising isn't the AI, but all the profound ignorance that exists out there, even from big shot execs! All work works like this. If it didn't, the economy would have collapsed during every technological milestone in human history.

Then don't trust a chatbot for internet search. There's much more to llms than chat bots

Yes you can. This comment might have made sense in early 2025.