> I listened to this week’s All In podcast and the podcasters (all wildly successful tech entrepreneurs) were quite emphatic that they were seeking a world where they were not beholden to developers. They envision a world where non- or semi-technical employees create the desired software via AI; other AI agents would then figure out how to deploy it.
Okay, so, the thing is, roughly every decade since 1960, someone has come out with something that promises “use this, and you won’t need those icky programmers anymore”. COBOL was originally marketed this way! And then you had various flavours of implausibly high level language, that Sun thing where you were meant to make software by dragging and dropping flowcharts (quite why that was supposed to be _easier_ than programming was unclear), Macromedia Flash (while this eventually just became a platform that people wrote programs for, it was originally touted as being a bit like the Sun thing, with Actionscript as a mere escape hatch), the recent ‘nocode’ trend, a few similar historical ‘nocode’ trends, and so forth.
The only thing that has come _close_ to doing this is the spreadsheet, though that kind of happened by accident, as people took what was originally supposed to be a simple tool and created nightmares (and this sort of aggressive use leaves you needing icky Excel experts, which may not be an improvement).
Like, I’ve never heard of that podcast, but on Googling it I note that none of the people involved could reasonably be called subject matter experts (also, argh, Jason Calacanis appears to still be a thing). I’m not sure why you’d take their word on it.
Okay, so, the thing is, roughly every decade since 1960, someone has come out with something that promises “use this, and you won’t need those icky programmers anymore”. COBOL was originally marketed this way! And then you had various flavours of implausibly high level language, that Sun thing where you were meant to make software by dragging and dropping flowcharts (quite why that was supposed to be _easier_ than programming was unclear), Macromedia Flash (while this eventually just became a platform that people wrote programs for, it was originally touted as being a bit like the Sun thing, with Actionscript as a mere escape hatch), the recent ‘nocode’ trend, a few similar historical ‘nocode’ trends, and so forth.
The only thing that has come _close_ to doing this is the spreadsheet, though that kind of happened by accident, as people took what was originally supposed to be a simple tool and created nightmares (and this sort of aggressive use leaves you needing icky Excel experts, which may not be an improvement).
Like, I’ve never heard of that podcast, but on Googling it I note that none of the people involved could reasonably be called subject matter experts (also, argh, Jason Calacanis appears to still be a thing). I’m not sure why you’d take their word on it.