[motoboi]

We maybe witnessing the last generation of master software artisans like antirez.

This is beautiful to see, their mastery harnessing the power of the intelligent machine tools to design, understand and build.

This is like seeing a master of image & light like michelangelo receiving a camera, photoshop and a printer. It's an exponential elevation of the art.

But to become a master like michelangelo one had to dedicate herself to the craft of manually mixing and applying materials to bend and modulate light, slowly building and consolidating those neural pathways by reflection and, most of all, practice, until those skills became as natural as getting up or bringing a hand to the mouth. When that happened, art flowed from her mind to the physical world and the body became the vessel of intuition.

A master like antirez had to wrap his head around concepts alien to the human mind. Bits, bytes, arrays, memory layout, processors, compilers, interfaces, abstractions, constraints, types, concurrency do not exist in the savannas that forged brains. Had to comprehend and learn to use his own cognitive capabilities and restrictions to know at what level to break the code units and the abstraction boundaries. At the very top, master this in a level so high that software became like Redis: beautiful, powerful and so elevated in the art that it became simpler, not more complex. It's Picasso drawing a dog.

The intelligent software building machines can do things no human manually can (given the same time, humans die, get old or get bored), but they are not brush and canvas. They function in another way, the mind needs other paths to master them. The path to master them is not the same path to master artisanal software building.

So, this new generation, wanting to build things not possible to the artisan, will become masters of another craft, one we right now cannot even comprehend or imagine, in the same way michelangelo could never imagine the level of control over light the modern photography masters have.

Me, not a master, but having dedicated my whole life to artisanal software building, am excited to receive and use the new tools, to experiment the new craft. Also frightened by the uncertainty of this new world.

What a time to be alive.

[zahlman]

> We maybe witnessing the last generation of master software artisans like antirez.

I'm told that chess is more popular than ever, despite it being decades since a human could dream of beating a top computer at it.

[bitwize]

More relevantly, I've been seeing an explosion of (ostensibly) human-produced artwork in my SM feed, despite that Stable Diffusion and the like are supposed to bypass the need for artistic skill and make your anime waifu come to laifu with a paragraph of prompt.

[falloutx]

> We maybe witnessing the last generation of master software artisans like antirez

What? He is mostly a AI influencer at this stage, even without getting paid for it (I think). There are always gonna be people writing code, people writing music, just because a machine can write code doesnt change the fact coding itself is a fun exercise.

[roncesvalles]

Not really.

>A master like antirez had to wrap his head around concepts alien to the human mind. Bits, bytes, arrays, memory layout, processors, compilers, interfaces, abstractions, constraints, types, concurrency do not exist in the savannas that forged brains.

You still need to know these things if you're doing anything more complicated than making some CRUD dashboard. LLMs assist with some code generation, and assist with some knowledge lookup. That's pretty much it.

What seems to be the case is that you need to know everything you needed to know before, and* become good at leveraging AI tooling to make you go faster.

*Even this is optional. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from just ignoring everything about AI and keep developing software like pre-2022. The efficiency difference isn't even significance in the grand scheme of things. It's not like people had reams of perfect software specs just lying around waiting to be implemented. That's just not how people develop software; usually the spec emerges while you're writing the program.

[theshrike79]

I don't see anyone lamenting the generation who single-handedly built games in machine code for the early home computers. No art was lost, we just evolved and started using more advanced languages that didn't require as much dedication to work in.

[motoboi]

Yeah. The guy who carefully arranged assembly instructions to match the memory magnetic drum movement latency perfectly so that when one instruction finished executing the drum was exactly over the next instruction to be read and executed.

Those guys? Masters. Their craft? Reinvented, rearranged, some parts of it abstracted away by a more intelligent machine.

Current masters don’t know about memory drums and their read latency, nor about assembly instruction set execution time, but they are still crafting interaction between machines and the physical world.

So the next generation will be master of what? Which skills will they possess?

[airbreather]

The true art is in the architecture, which is the bit humans still generally control, not the tiny details.

Unless you would rather be a calligrapher than a novelist.

[motoboi]

care to elaborate why?

[motoboi]

michelangelo was an image master. He used paint and brush because those were the advanced tools of the time. His goal was not to paint, but to create images.

Also, I'm pretty sure we would give a leg to have a CNC machine.

[auggierose]

Well said. I think you see where things are going clearer than most here.