Instead, what we have today is a computing ecosystem dominated by powerful players who care about money and control. Speaking from the standpoint of a Bay Area resident, since roughly 2012, the field has been increasingly taken over by people who are in it for the money. Combine that with Alan Kay’s observation that computer science is a “pop culture” that often lives in the moment and has little regard for the past, and also combine that with the “move fast and break things” attitude that permeates modern software development, and this has created an environment that seems hostile to the types of nerdy pursuits that the industry once encouraged. The working environments of many major software companies and the products they release are a reflection of the values of the companies’ executives, managers, and shareholders.
While I’m not anti-AI, I see agentic coding as another step in the direction that the software industry was already heading towards, where it can move even faster and break even more things.
There is still wonder, joy, and freedom in computing, but I feel this is increasingly confined to the hobbyist world and certain niches in research environments.
Design time, code time, compile time, run time. Why all that potentially wasteful upfront work?
The next step are shipped applications whose help menu is a chat interface that responds to all user questions of the form "How do I ...", with a short pause to add a new hack to the existing pile, and then some upbeat instructions.
In theory this should be nirvana. No more vibe coding! Everyone is a power user. Zero dependencies. But there will be much weeping.
If I had to sum up the zeitgeist of the '90s techno-optimism it would be this persistent, confident prediction that once people just learned _how_ to use computers, and everyone is a power user everything will be fine! Despite the mounting evidence that actually, no, like everything else in reality the distribution of skill is a bell-curve with the median sitting uncomfortably low for those who, to quote OP, "lived on IRC or in the bash terminal".
Free universal education didn't fix this problem, LLMs won't fix this problem. Man's natural paucity is no longer in the availability or accessibility of knowledge. The liberal ideal that all we must do is empower the individual turns out to not have been the solution to everything forever.
But hey, being self-aware enough to make productive use of this new technology is probably _some_ kind of edge.
May as many as possible survive.
I guess because I’m in game dev maybe, but in all my jobs knowing about the underlying stack has either been necessary knowledge or highly regarded.
I can’t think of any time in my career where knowing about the internals of the stack was ever frowned upon or where it’s been anything other than an advantage (especially when hunting bugs). I must have been lucky.