In other words, it's taken a highly enjoyable and lucrative vocation from vast swathes of workers - a lot of which make up this sites audience! - and instead concentrated more productive power in the hands of a few megacorps.
You gave your own example for the doom and gloom.
It has made it far more accessible to a lot more people. Being “highly enjoyable” and “lucrative” is why people try to gatekeep it.
The fact that the means of this capability is in a few hands does suck. But I’m increasingly optimistic that it’s going to be commoditized through open weight models and performance improvements. There is enormous demand for innovations on these fronts.
It hasn't made it more accessible to anyone. It's destroyed it. Who still writes code?
You’ve got to understand that coding isn’t the point for a lot of people. It’s just the thing in the way of making stuff and solving problems.
I do understand that.
That's my point, in fact. We're losing the profession just so the annoying guy that would pester you with his stupid app idea can now shit it out himself, lighting the planet on fire in the process.
I'm a rare individual that has consistently made choices to earn less money in order to have more enjoyment. I would clock fewer hours than they wanted me to during college for my internships, I left a FAANG to go back to startups, I quit a startup to work on volunteer work and try to bootstrap a business.
At multiple jobs I've noted that I felt the pay should have been less. Not so that the employers could take a bigger slice of the pie (in fact, my preference is to be in an anarchist co-op, but I understand that's a wild take and might be terrible in practice). My hope was that we could filter for people that genuinely want to do the work and take on fewer people that were there for the money. At the same time more money is more better. And I like having money. It's complicated.
As I've said many times before, I didn't come to Silicon Valley to get paid. I came here to make computers do cool things alongside other people. I need income to do that, but I try to make sure I'm in a situation where the income isn't something I need to think about all of the time. If you're doing mercenary work that's not possible.
I think being able to accomplish more from places that are a fraction the cost of Silicon Valley will also help achieve the goal of doing things for reasons other than the money.
I think the amount of protectionism we’ll see could be absolutely enormous. Not only do incumbent corporations not want to lose share, incumbent countries won’t want to share either.
Definitely. For now I'm making friends with lots of very capable people - it's not as easy to do that outside of a hub like SF.
> I think the amount of protectionism we’ll see could be absolutely enormous because corporations aren’t capable of altruistic attitudes.
On some fronts they will be powerless to stop the changes. I look forward to drinking the tears of IP owners when breaking through their DRM and recovering their source code is just a matter of sharing a model ID, prompt, and hyper parameters. Reverse engineer NVidia's firmware and drivers. Decompile and port Nintendo's latest console's operating system. We may soon find ourselves in a world where tasks like that are achievable in a few days on consumer hardware.