I have read a reasonably large amount of science fiction in my life. A subset of this is post-singularity fiction, which broadly asks the question: “What do we do when literally everything is convenient?”
Optimistically, the answers are often things like:
- explore the universe
- defeat aliens
and pessimistically,
- be defeated by aliens
- become a dopamine-addicted brain in a jar
- make technology illegal and become trapped in a constant cycle of resetting the world when certain discoveries are made
I try not to read too many of the extremely malaise-inducing stories, but they’re so common that they sneak into my reading anyways.
Lately, the practice I’ve spent more than 20 years on has been, essentially, solved. The actual art of programming is, for me, dead and buried. I will probably never write a line of code by hand again, unless I feel the need to prove to myself that I can do it, or it becomes illegal to use LLMs, or some other unlikely scenario.
I was never good enough to be one of those people who has deep pride in their ability to program. In hubristic moments, I saw myself as a craftsman, a wizard, but in reality I have only ever been a fairly adequate programmer. I can say with absolute certainty that today’s frontier models are better at programming than I was, on my best day.
I kind of wish I had spent much more time on actual computer science, or some other field that is adjacent to programming practice but not exclusively about it. I spent a lot of time trying to be a good programmer, and a lot of that time is more or less irrelevant now. I think I wish I had spent more time learning to be a theorist than a practitioner.
Anyway, what I was trying to get at with the title of this post and the opening was: I can now, truly, build effectively any software that I can be bothered to specify. I’ve built everything I ever wanted to build for myself. Anything I ever want to build? Built. It’s done. As long as I can express the thought in a vaguely coherent manner, the thing can exist. Everything is convenient. So what now?
As an illustration, the rest of this blog post has been left unwritten - just get an AI to write the rest of it, I guess.