alt Hacker NewsThese damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened.
Replies
Partially, but no. First:
- Other input that a deck of cards. Terminals and teletypes were a revolution.
- Assembly was much better than hardware switches.
- Also, a proper keyboard input against some "monitor" software was zillions better than, again, a deck of cards/hardware toggles. When you can have a basic line basic editor and dump your changes in a paper tape or print your output you have now live editing instead of suffering batch jobs.
You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated.
Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years.
Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claude Code and Codex are just glimpses into the future.
The article makes this very point. From the article: “software has been industrialising for a long time: through reusable components (open source code), portability (containerisation, the cloud), democratisation (low-code / no-code tools), interoperability (API standards, package managers) and many other ways”