Your words resonate with me. Even before LLMs, I’ve been disappointed with the general direction the software industry took in the 2010s. Today’s software industry is not the industry of Licklider, Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Woz, Stallman, Ritchie, Thompson, Pike, Joy, and many others whom I admire, who helped establish an ethos of computing that fostered a sense of freedom, creativity, and wonder.

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.