alt Hacker News> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.
Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".
Replies
config.sys was understandable. Now your computer has thousands (probably more) of config.sys-sized components and you are still only one person. The classic UI may improve your ability to find the components (sometimes) but can't reduce the complexity of either the components themselves or their quantity. AI makes it possible to deal with this complexity in a functional way.
Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to its uses.
> Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I feel much the same.
> There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys
There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.