AI could make software creation as widespread as literacy

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 32:12

   I mean, it totally can do that if you wanted to. Oh, man. So what I'm hearing here is in terms, there's always this question, should I learn to code? Should people in school learn to code? But what I heard from you is your take is in a year or two, you don't really need to. My take is I think for people that are using quad code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under.

2. 32:37

   But yeah, in a year or two, it's not going to matter. I was thinking about what is the right historical analog for this? Because somehow we have to situate this thing in history and kind of figure out When have we gone through similar transitions? What's the right kind of mental model for this? I think the thing that's come closest for me is the printing press. And so, you know, if you look at Europe in, you know, like in the mid 1400s, literacy was actually very low.

3. 33:06

   There was sub 1% of the population. It was scribes that, you know, they were the ones that did all the writing. They were the ones that did all the reading. They were employed by like lords and kings that often were not literate themselves. And so it was their job of this very tiny percent of the population to do this. And at some point, Gutenberg and the printing press came along. And there was this crazy stat that in the 50 years after the printing press was built, there was more printed material created than in the thousand years before.

4. 33:38

   And so the volume of printed material just went way up. The cost went way down. It went down something like 100x over the next 50 years. And if you look at literacy, it actually took a while because learning to read and write is quite hard. It takes an education system. It takes free time. It takes not having to work on a farm all day so that you actually have time for education and things like this.

5. 34:00

   But over the next 200 years, it went up to 70% globally. So I think this is the kind of thing that we might see is a similar kind of transition. and there was actually this interesting historical document where there was an interview with some like scribe in the 1400s about like how do you feel about the printing press and they were actually very excited because they were like actually the thing that I don't like doing is copying between books the thing that I do like doing is drawing the art in books and then doing the book binding and I'm really glad that now my time is freed up and it's interesting like as an engineer I sort of felt like apparel with this.

6. 34:40

   Like this is sort of how I feel where I don't have to do the tedious work anymore of coding because this has always been sort of the detail of it. It's always been the tedious part of it and kind of like messing with a git and kind of using all these different tools. That was not the fun part. The fun part is figuring out what to build and coming up with this. It's talking to users. It's thinking about these big systems.

7. 35:00

   It's thinking about the future. It's collaborating with other people on the team. And that's what I get to do more of now. And what's amazing is that the tool you're building allows anybody to do this. People that have no technical experience can do exactly what you're describing. Like I've been doing a bunch of random little projects and it's just like anytime you get stuck, just like help me figure this out.

8. 35:22

   And you get unblocked. Like I used to, I was an engineer for an earlier in my career for 10 years. And I just remember spending so much time on like libraries and dependencies and things and just like, oh my God, what do I do? And then looking on Stack Overflow. And now it's just like, help me figure this out. And here's step by step, one, two, three, four. Okay, we got this. Yeah, exactly. I was talking to an engineer earlier today.

9. 35:42

   They're like, they're writing some service in Go. And, you know, it's been like a month already and they built up the service. Like it's working quite well. And then I was like, okay, so like, how do you feel writing? And he was like, you know, like, I still don't really know Go. But I think we're going to start to see more and more of this. It's like, if you know that it works correctly and efficiently, then you don't actually have to know all the details.