The Last Programmers || Xipu Li

Thought provoking piece on how developing software is evolving. There is a core theme here that resonates strongly with me:

But here's what I've realized watching them: they're not lazy. They're just following the natural path that technology has always followed. Every major advancement in programming has been about abstracting away complexity so humans can focus on higher-level problems. We moved from machine code to assembly to high-level languages to frameworks to libraries. Each step made things "easier" and each step had people complaining that developers were getting soft.

The reality today is that every modern developer is building on dozens of layers of abstraction. With the complexity of software today nobody, really nobody, understands what is happening on the lowest level of the machine. I like to think of your average Python developer creating a dictionary object. Do they know what just happened in memory and how that is going to evolve as they shove more and more data into it? Most have no clue.

And, honestly, that is fine. Even better. Worrying about those details limit your ability to see the broader scope. It focuses you on the "how" over the "what" too much.

However, there is a time when that detail can matter. It is typically around performance, security, and reliability. Then it gets harder. Those problems will still exist, but how we solve them will evolve.

The archetypes of Experimenters and Guardians are definitely real examples. On the whole, this direction suggested is likely accurate, but I would suggest not as extreme.