I belong to an old-computer interest group on one of the socials. Recently a whitebeard posted a picture of a stock trading floor from the 80s or early 90s, and noted that every trader had two PCs—because the NASD did not allow their NASDAQ trading software to be installed with any other application on the same computer.
Banks and financial firms have been super careful about this stuff since well before the AI era.
Pivoting into content creation. It's gonna be a series of videos of me programming, without AI assistance, so that some echo of the old ways persists, or at least is a little bit louder, for my having been here to preserve it. Mainly it will be work on personal projects I hold dear. I was inspired by the likes of Tsoding, although like Hayyoth I type into a box to narrate rather than speaking, as no one really wants to hear me blab.
Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, was legally Edwin Aldrin up until the 2010s or so, when he was in his 80s. People had been calling him Buzz for decades, so I guess he figured why not.
Unrelated fact about Aldrin: his mother's maiden name was Moon. Bit of nominative determinism by proxy there.
According to Wikipedia, he changed is name in 1988, at age 58. So I guess he changed his name in the 80s, not his 80s. Still fairly late in life to change your name, though!
(And "Buzz" came from one of his sisters misprounouncing "brother" as "buzzer". What a cute origin!)
My mother's situation is complicated by being a dual citizen – she'd have to update all her paperwork with the governments of two separate countries.
I am also a dual citizen, so would have the same issue – except unlike my mother, I can't think of any plausible reason why I might want to change my legal name.
Yes, people care. Part of the job of management is not just to define what is to be done, but how it is to be done. Let's put to bed this notion of "nobody cares how you do the job as long as it gets done" because it's hogwash.
In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor came up with scientific management, a set of principles for determining the most efficient way to perform work tasks using systematic observation and measurement rather than tradition and "rule of thumb". The problem Taylor was trying to solve was that of soldiering, or as we call it more euphemistically today, "quiet quitting"—doing the bare minimum of work necessary to keep your job. If the best way of performing a particular task were known to management, soldiering workers could be held to account for not performing as much work as they could, effectively stealing from their employers. So since that time, business has had a vested interest in understanding the best way to perform all business tasks and making that the institutional standard.
You might think "But that doesn't apply to us in software engineering/IT. We use our smarts to solve problems." You couldn't be more wrong. Milt Bryce's insight was that the exact same management principles that applied to the manufacturing and construction industries applied to information systems as well, and treating a software shop like an industrial factory would save the company time, money, and effort.
Today, it is known that, when properly prompted, LLMs write better code than humans, much faster than humans can, and test it much more thoroughly as well. So yes, your employer absolutely cares whether you use an LLM or not. What rational person wouldn't, especially if they don't want to waste time or money? Furthermore, now that LLM use has been standardized as best practice because they are vastly more efficient, if you refuse to use LLMs on the job, you are stealing from your employer. Your boss has every right to fire you, and they'd be right to do so.
I kind of love this analogy, actually, because Taylorism and scientific management also had serious downsides for the employees involved. That kind of micromanagement leads directly to burnout, and the elimination of supposed "wasted movement", in search of repeated optimized motions, leads directly to RSI and workplace injury. But if the workers are just replaceable cogs in the machine, who cares? Certainly it boosted productivity.
> If you refuse to use LLMs on the job, you are stealing from your employer. Your boss has every right to fire you, and they'd be right to do so.
So now it's our chance to be abused to improve the bottom line.
Before Taylorism, line workers were worked to the bone. Taylor was one of the first to identify that 8-hour workdays and frequent, short breaks actually boosted productivity.
Although one of Taylor's quotes has special resonance in the AI era: "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must come first."
Programming was a job where the man has long been first. That era is coming to a close.
It's possible I've accidentally swallowed some labor union propaganda during my education, but that's a much too rosy interpretation of Taylorism. Line workers have always been up against pressure to be worked to the bone, before and after Taylor. As you've already pointed out, workers were getting away with soldiering pre-Taylor, and then weren't immediately post-Taylor. I recall something about subsequent labor strikes. The very working conditions he helped impose would have made the ideal scenario for him to identify just how much a shorter work day and short breaks were now needed. But then, at least in the US, we didn't get the Fair Labor Standards Act for nearly three decades later.
Also, Robert Owen had Frederick Taylor beat on the 8 hour workday front by like a century. Maybe Taylorism was, in practice, one of the last straws. Or maybe it was Taylor's scientific support that helped convince the legislature an 8 hour workday was needed. Personally, I have my interpretation based on the evidence, and I don't see it boding well for software engineering as a profession in our immediate future.
Look mate, I don't like this future we're in, but I can't wishcast it away or pretend it's still mid-2025 and the slop machine is bound to collapse aaaaaany minute now. The technology is here and it's an absolute game changer. A lot of people who derived ego satisfaction from slinging code are going to find themselves handily outcompeted by a machine. And the best coders of the past—the Linuses and Carmacks of the world—are now welcoming our new robot overlords.
In Vernor Vinge's "True Names" there is a character in the MC's cabal of hackers who does not appear in person in the virtual space, but their presence is felt there via messages that trickle in very slowly on a virtual teletype machine. After some speculation that it might be the vanguard of an alien invasion, it turns out to be a CIA AI that requires much more processing time to think than would allow it to carry on real-time conversation.
Something like this was called "sprite compilation" and used a lot in the DOS game coding scene back in the day. The idea was, given a bitmap image of a sprite, produce the code that would draw that sprite on the screen in assembly and incorporate it into your game. Not very flexible, but fast and useful in the days when games had a lot of 2D bits and bobs moving around, especially for those who could not yet afford a 486 and were stuck on an old Tandy 1000 or something...
Most of us in the field have to produce software for money, and the economics of that have shifted to the point where LLM use is table stakes. Programming by hand is now an idle curiosity, a leisure-time activity.
It's happening. The powers that be are now deciding what kind and how much compute you may have. Enjoy your 4 GiB cloud terminal. You won't be able to own much more without a D-U-N-S number.
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