If the predictions of the death of software engineering come to fruition, the only acceptable result of that is a world where "software" is a detail about how computers do things that some people can investigate for the sake of their curiosity, or because they are particularly meticulous about some detail. A world in which any software can be created by prompting eventually converges into a world where people solve their own problems with software, without thinking about the act of creating software. The idea of selling software in that world becomes ridiculous, and computers reach their potential as a tool normal people and businesses alike can use to solve problems.

To be clear, as someone who currently makes a living on making software, this is a major upheaval and sucks for me at least in the short term, because of the economic realities of the society in which we live. However, there are only two classes of alternatives. One is that the "AI can make all software" world fails to materialize. We're certainly not guaranteed this outcome, LLMs still generate sprawling and buggy code and we are in an era of unprecedented levels of tech rot. It's possible this is an unsolvable problem, and engineering, while probably assisted by LLMs, still requires people do a lot of manual work, or at least steering and guiding. The idea that we can already get reliable software out of claude go brr is uh... pretty misguided and silly, and at best the people who push that idea are, shall we say, optimistic. I think software engineering for a company continues to suck in this world, and I hope there's the opportunity for more people to go around being computer-touchers for non-computer-people in a more integrated context, rather than some massive "tech industry" increasingly insulating itself from society at large and building shit to try to ensnare and enthrall people, as it has been for the last few decades.

But I do think it's pretty plausible we get there, get to the computer that you just interact with by asking it for things - which it builds as software on the backend because software is a way more reliable and cheap way to repeatedly do the same task than throwing an LLM at the problem fresh each time you need something - but mostly people don't worry about that part. In that world, we either get to own computers or we don't, and if we don't, we are in an authoritarian dystopia the likes of which the world has never seen and may never escape. That's the second alternative. Governments outlaw computers or companies make it impossible for consumers to get their hands on them or some combination of these. This is the world that most large tech firms clearly want, and even as they praise open source software and rely on it as the backbone of most things they do, they seek to enclose the commons and use it as a means of societal control and get fat off of rent-seeking. A world in which the awesome power of the general purpose computer is a tool of control by an elite aristocracy is a world of either extermination or oppression of an unprecedented number of people, both in sheer numbers and percentage of the population. I think it behooves almost everyone to fight against this class of outcome tooth and nail, no matter what promises the present crop of aristocrats tries to entice you with

Personally I want the world where a computer is just a tool most people have, that does computation things a person or organization wants, and asking in a way that gets them what they want is a pretty normal skill to have. Star Trek really feels prescient as I watch "non-technical" people start to engage with solving their own problems with computers more. It feels very plausible that people find themselves asking for things we currently have to write programs for in plain natural language. I think we could get there on our current trajectory. But we could also get a world where governments and corporations conspire to hoard computation and lock the general public out of it.

I don't think "software factories" are useless in this moment any more than I think writing programming languages was useless ten years ago. I do agree that there's an infinitesimal likelihood of this making you money in the short term, though. You likely won't be able to sell them, make a business out of them competing with the big guys, or maybe even leverage them at your corporate job. For your own purposes, though? Why not? Not everyone cares about setting the terms by which we build things with computers, but some do, and more power to them. Letting this be monopolized is a part of how we get the bad outcomes. If operating systems had fully become a monopoly, we'd already be much further into the bad outcomes than we are