alt Hacker NewsI'm not old enough to have gone through the revolution that was programming languages that got increasingly more abstract and decoupled from the metal, but surely there's a lesson that can be learned from that era?
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Yes. As machhine power and memory increased, and as as programming abstractions advanced, software grew larger and more bloated, therefore what used to run on a single core in KB of RAM now takes multiple cores and GB of ram.
The developers who knew how to write efficient low-level code found that there were no jobs for that anynmore, so today the developers who can work at that level are very few.
The same will happen with AI being the new abstraction. In another decade or two, very few people will be able to write code by hand. We'll need a rack of compute in a data center and multiple KW of power to do what we used to do on a desktop PC drawing a couple of hundred Watts.
Those abstractions are deterministic. LLMs are not.