3 ms·
Middleman doesn't sit right we me. We're not interposing ourselves and imposing the need to go through us. People have wished to do away with computer code spe
by namaria 2y ago
Middleman doesn't sit right we me. We're not interposing ourselves and imposing the need to go through us.
People have wished to do away with computer code specialists ever since they found out computers could do things for them. But what make computers useful - their ability to be very exact and to do a lot (and I mean A LOT) of very exact things very quickly is the magic.
You can't wish for very complex things done in a very exacting way but not needing to be exact yourself. You can hire people to do that for you. But thinking that you can somehow get a computer to be very fast and very exact for you without needing other people to go through the effort of being very exact about thoughts and language is just magical thinking.
Software that can make software will be more complex than the software it makes and will necessitate more people to have exact thoughts and conversations and writings, not less.
- jfengel 2y agoI take your point, and I concur. I picked "middlemen" to highlight some assumptions we make about ourselves, that the programs exist for their own purpose and not as means to an end. But you're correct that this is a necessary thing, not something that we've captured. At our best, we do exactly what you say: take things that people say and make them more concrete and specific. This is something I think a lot of programmers don't realize: it is fundamentally a human job. We are "in the middle" between the people (with their vague, hazy ideas) and the computer (with its very simplistic binary model of the world). When we think that our jobs are all about computers, we're setting ourselves up to be replaced. Not by AI, but by plain old software written once and then left there.