Policy researcher Henry Shevlin warns of losing manual coding skills.
We are leaving the Old Code Age, the Paleocodic, the artisinal code era, where if you needed a novel program, you would commission a local codesmith or code guild to hand-craft a work of code for you, bespoke.
it's truly insane what people were able to build in the last few decades by manually typing the code character by character
Many users praise the 'Paleocodic' metaphor framing AI's replacement of hand-crafted programming as clever and insightful, while some lament the loss of artisanal coding knowledge as a tragedy.
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We will look back on their work with wonder - how could humans have built this with keyboards alone?
We are leaving the Old Code Age, the Paleocodic, the artisinal code era, where if you needed a novel program, you would commission a local codesmith or code guild to hand-craft a work of code for you, bespoke.
@emollick
@emollick It’s a tragedy to think of all the code-knapping knowledge that will be lost.
@emollick the codesmith metaphor is too good
most people will go straight from zero to ai generated
@emollick 3D engines man. Video games. How on earth.
@emollick Will code get more or less efficient as we leave the paleocidic? Craft constraint vs compute abundance etc?
@emollick Codesmith code is going to be like pre-nuclear steel
@emollick Only if folks require less accuracy, transparency, verficatoon in areas that previously required them.
@emollick Paleocodic is a genuinely great bit
@emollick We are entering a brief intermediate era where producing code is industrialized, like we did with production of material goods. Then the Silicocene arrives, where code runs humans rather than the other way round (early signs are already visible).
@emollick cometh codo erectus
@emollick rip to the journeyman who spent six weeks hand-forging a dropdown menu
@emollick Well bless your heart, thank you.
The truth is that all software engineers were pretty bad without Google and Stack Overflow.
@emollick The codesmith era generally led to building code for the masses to be economical.
Now we all have our own team of thousands of codesmiths to build anything we like. The true custom, bespoke, code era is just starting!
@emollick hand-crafted code definitely had charm and soul
but also came with a 90 page invoice and a 6 month delivery window
@emollick This is a good analogy, though if you have seen new house development or fast fashion (industrialized products), the quality is really bad and things feel disposable.
@emollick I do think about this a lot!
@emollick You certainly sound like a wordsmith :D
@emollick Yea. Been coding for 30 years. In the grand scheme of things humans have only been given a blink of an eye to directly program the digital computation. I count myself fortunate to be one of those that touched the divine and built the invisible cathedrals.
@emollick Soon be a conspiracy that coders secretly had coding AI for decades