I think there are two use cases of open source, one is for people who need a solution to grab and use. In this case, I think LLM Agents will pick up quickly and replace grab and use type of engineering.
The second use case is for HUMAN to learn from human. Your open source projects are excellent examples, same with Django and Python open source ecosystem.
I just hope humans will not stop learning. As long as you share your passion of learning, people will learn from you. It has nothing to do automation.
There is a third type: rabbit. This is a golden age of rabbit holes. A quick rabbit jumps through complicated holes and tunnels to escape from something or chase something.
We can also call someone chasing a rabbit a fox. Like all the ones chasing LLM agents now.
To some extent. Many mathematical breakthroughs are not from mathematicians thinking in the office but mathematical minded people doing engineering work and bumped into big ideas. Mandelbrot was one of them, so was Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Tony Hoare, …
They are engineers by trade, that is chasing the money as food. But money is not enough for them. So I would call them rabbits instead of foxes.
If you read that Wirth 1995 paper (A Plea for Lean Software) referenced by the OP, following paragraphs answered your question:
“
To some, complexity equals power
A system’s ease of use always should be a primary goal, but that ease should be based on an underlying concept that makes the use almost intuitive. Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user. (What it does confer is a feeling of helplessness, if not impotence.) Therefore, the lure of complexity as sale incentive is easily understood; complexity promotes customer dependence on the vendor.”
I am typing (no screenshots or copy and paste) this 30 year old wisdom in to reply here as an archived reminder for myself.
After leaving my previous day job, I have some downtime to get back to thinking and realizing how much I love reading and thinking.
Contemplating the old RTFM, I started a new personal project called WTFM and spends time writing instead of coding. There is no agenda and product goals.
That is a great point. People in this group are programming at a different abstraction level, i.e., allocating computing resources, both human and machine resources.
Now AI agents are cheap but they generate a lot of slop, and potential minefields that might be costly to clean. The ROI will show up eventually and people in the second group will find out their jobs might be in danger. Hopefully a third group will come to save them.
I have been diving deeply in the Rust community and ecosystem and really enjoyed reading the decade of real engineering poor into it, from RFCs to std, critical crates such as serde, and testing practices. What a refreshing world.
Compared to the mess created by Node.js npm amateur engineers, it really shows who is 10x or 100x.
Outsourcing critical thinking to pattern matching and statistical prediction will make the haystacks even more unmanageable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338286
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