Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.

- Jensen Huang, February 2024

https://www.techradar.com/pro/nvidia-ceo-predicts-the-death-...

God help us!

Far from everyone are cut out to be programmers, the technical barrier was a feature if anything.

There's a kind of mental discipline and ability to think long thoughts, to deal with uncertainty; that's just not for everyone.

What I see is mostly everyone and their gramps drooling at the idea of faking their way to fame and fortune. Which is never going to work, because everyone is regurgitating the same mindless crap.

Remember when Visual Basic was making everyone a programmer too?

(btw, warm fuzzies for VB since that's what I learned on! But ultimately, those VB tools business people were making were:

1) Useful, actually!

2) Didn't replace professional software. Usually it'd hit a point where if it needed to evolve past its initial functionality it probably required an actual software developer. (IE, not using Access as a database and all the other eccentricities of VB apps at that time)

The problem I mostly see with non programmers is that they don't really grasp the concept of a consistent system.

A lot of people want X, but they also want Y, while clearly X and Y cannot coexist in the same system.

This looks like the same problem as when the first page layout software came out.

It looked to everyone like a huge leap into a new world word processing applications could basically move around blocks of text to be output later, maybe with a few font tags, then this software came out that wow actually showed the different fonts, sizes, and colors on the screen as you worked! With apps like "Pagemaker" everyone would become their own page designers!

It turned out that everyone just turned out floods of massively ugly documents and marketing pieces that looked like ransom notes pasted together from bits of magazines. Years of awfulness.

The same is happening now as we are doomed to endure years AI slop in everything from writing to apps to products to vending machines an entire companies — everyone and their cousin is trying to fully automate it.

Ultimately it does create an advance and allows more and better work to be done, but only for people who have a clue about what they are doing, and eventually things settle at a higher level where the experts in each field take the lead.