The Death of Software Development

I think this is loosely speaking correct, but what I think is interesting, is that everyone is talking about what is changing, but maybe it's because I'm an SRE and not strictly speaking a dev, but I think it's interesting that more time isn't spent talking about what is staying the same, and I think..

Software was always free. Or maybe, software is never free. Generating code was never the bottleneck, at least on the backend (I'm sure it was on the frontend / app development, though in a mature app, the limitation is UX) but every company I've worked for had a few CTO's/principle/distinguished engineer who could drop a few thousand line MR into various repos, it was the integration step that was hard. And, as has been pointed out time and again, "Lines of code written" has always been a terrible metric of developer productivity.

So like, while everything is different, lots of things are staying the same as well. And similar to, I've never worked at a company that didn't have too much code, I've also never worked at a company that didn't have too many services in production.

It will be cool to see all the new tools that people can build to help with production, it will be a constant effort to keep production clean as well. Cost optimization. etc.

The article talks the truth. For some of us it's a scary truth, for others an opportunity. The problem is the opportunities will be less and less as the main providers evolve and grow because the brain wont be in the business logic but in the llm.

Very astute description of what is happening in software dev land. Once you have a tool like Claude Code on your Mac Terminal, you can clone just about anything, very scary. I didn't clone, I built my own from scratch. No human devs.

That entire website may very well be AI generated including the blog post itself.

We need a new movement "Prompt Posts", instead of generating an entire blog post, share the prompt instead and save us having to skim 1000 words of AI content.