>> But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how to program, but recognize that a program could do this task, finally can now summon that program to do the task. The path still has a tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI titans racing to get programming ability into Supply Chain Technician Kim's hands. Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for your mother to use
Brooks has yet to be proven wrong; even if this appears to be the silver bullet it could be just as likely that this widens the tech moat when non-programmers paint themselves into corners where they can't do their jobs without all the brittle, impossible to maintain code they've written. Think of the skilled trades vacuum we have in much of the Western world. Can Supply Chain Technician Kim Jr do her job without AI if she's never seen that before?
I think the core disconnect is that the current tech paradigm is writing broad scope feature packed programs (and it kind of needs to be that way). One stop shops for every need that the broadest possible customer base could have, while minimizing time that needs to be spent on support.
But I don't see that being the future. Instead I think people will just spin up bespoke ultra narrow scope programs (maybe scripts is more fitting here, but people like GUIs - scripts with GUIs?) that are generally under 3K LOC.
You don't need an AI to one-shot Excel.exe if you just want a simple way to track how many plastic pellets came in today, and how many went out. A GUI on a simple program on an SQlite database will do that no problem. And you can ditch that bloated excel doc you have been using for years.
At my own company we forwent a proprietary CAD package because Claude could decode the files we had, make a GUI for doing the transformation we needed to do, and properly reencode the file.
Brooks has yet to be proven wrong; even if this appears to be the silver bullet it could be just as likely that this widens the tech moat when non-programmers paint themselves into corners where they can't do their jobs without all the brittle, impossible to maintain code they've written. Think of the skilled trades vacuum we have in much of the Western world. Can Supply Chain Technician Kim Jr do her job without AI if she's never seen that before?