The end of manual programming

And this is the classic ball of mud where you end up with a system that's a ball of mud-... because it's just put together in a way where nothing is connected and it's just a real mess, right? I've seen that with agents, and I've seen it in our own code bases where, again, the first PR is, like, mediocre of quality, and then if you add another PR on top of that, and then five more down the line, it's not very good, right? So there's still a payoff to that, but that payoff is premised on our current moment. I am now able to... And this is, by the way, where the AI psychosis really comes in, when you try to extrapolate what nine months from now it's gonna look like. What two years from now it's gonna look like. But as an intellectual experiment, I think the first computer I used was a Commodore 64.

`1:03:11`

It had one megahertz CPU and 64K of memory. Everyone who wrote software for that machine internalized certain constraints. Well, all the constraints. That machine was nothing but constraints. If you put that programmer in a time machine and teleported him or her to 2026 and gave them a modern computer today and said, "Now write me a piece of software," they'd be lost for a little bit because all their techniques and all their heuristics would simply be wrong. Or not wrong, because efficient software is still beautiful. They would be out of date with the value that they could create. The amount of optimization you have to apply for a one megahertz computer to produce a video game is just very different from what you have to apply today.

`1:04:17`

It's romantic too, though. Let's also imagine that. This is one of the things, whenever we bemoan modern car culture, for example, right? And then we think like, "Oh, wasn't it better when we all had the horse-drawn carriages and so on?" No, it wasn't. Do you know what New York smelled like when we used horses for transportation? It was an open sewer. They just shat everywhere.

`1:04:43`

... to experience the nostalgic past, when you don't get the all the furry impulses and senses.

`1:04:57`

It's already happening, the romanticization of handwritten code. And I have some of it because it was a very romantic era. I'm grateful to have been alive for 20 years of economically valuable handwritten code. That was a, that was a good time.

`1:05:20`

Correct. Because handwritten beautiful code exists as much today as it did yesterday. There are people who willfully write new video games for the Commodore 64, or for the second Mega Drive, or for other vintage consoles. In fact, one of my favorite video games of late is ModRetro's. Do you know Palmer Luckey's-... side geschäft, which is recreating old consoles. So he's recreated the Game Boy.