For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat.
Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for bans, fearing they would be driven into poverty.
The "Purity" Argument: Some critics argued that hand-copying was a spiritual act that instilled discipline, whereas the press was "mechanical" and "soulless."
Aesthetic Elitism: Wealthy bibliophiles initially looked down on printed books as "cheap" or "ugly" compared to hand-illuminated manuscripts. Some collectors even refused to allow printed books in their libraries to maintain their prestige.
Sound familiar?
From "How the Printing Press Reshaped Associations" -- https://smsonline.net.au/blog/how-the-printing-press-reshape... and
"How the Printing Press Changed the World" -- https://www.koolchangeprinting.com/post/how-the-printing-pre...
I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy.
What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of "problem spaces"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?).
To paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well.
So far, when a new technology is introduced that people were initially afraid of, end up creating a whole new set of jobs and industries.
Anyone with access to the internet can use an LLM to do things.
Maybe the world is better off with fewer coders, as more software ideas can materialize into working software faster?
