The Death Sprital
Paraphrasing Twain, Reports Of (Our) Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
AI makes knowledge *look* less expensive.
As knowledge becomes less expensive, those selling knowledge have fewer buyers. As they have fewer buyers, they’re more likely to turn to LLMs to fill the gap. As they turn to LLMs with their low price points, buyers notice. As buyers notice, there are fewer of them. The cycle continues with fewer buyers, less specialty, until a crater.
There has been a lot of talk about the death of programming. But programming has always been more than syntax generation. Programmers internally joke about people thinking HTML is a language. It stands for Hypertext Markup Language, sure, but calling it a programming language in a room full of developers is a reliable way to get laughed out of that room. The joke exists because there’s a fundamental confusion between describing something and making something do something. That confusion is everywhere right now.
Word processing made typing easier. It didn’t turn people into authors. The author was never the person who could operate the typewriter the fastest.
When I lived in France, I lived near Barbizon. In the 1840s, new paint technology, specifically oil paints in portable tubes, enabled artists to suddenly leave the studio and paint outside. The Barbizon school and later the Impressionists were born from that moment. But the technology didn’t turn ordinary people into painters. It gave talented painters a new capability. The ones who weren’t painters before the tubes showed up weren’t painters after, either.
A race to the bottom on cost is a classic commoditization move, and it almost always ends in tragedy unless you can afford enormous losses. Best of luck competing against Google, Apple, or Harvard with its brand and $57 billion endowment. They can lose money on knowledge delivery longer than you can stay solvent.
When I was a child, I ran an errand with my father. Those electronic organs where you press a key and they play a melody were new. My father walked out of the store and saw me, a virtuoso, hammering away. He bought the organ.
That led to two immediate discussions: a) who was going to tell my mother, and b) where to put the organ when it was delivered.
It gathered dust. I never learned to do more than press a key and play Chopsticks.
Modern vibe coding is like that organ. Someone with no programming background asks an LLM to build something, it appears on screen, and they feel like a virtuoso. But the feeling fades, the thing gathers dust, and the distance between pressing a key that plays a melody and actually being a musician turns out to be the same distance it always was.
But I got pretty good at other things though piano wasn’t one of them. And that’s the part of this story nobody is telling. The death of programming, the death of expertise, the idea that we’ll all be virtuosos because the tools got easier. None of that is happening. What’s happening is that the tools got easier and the people who were already good got better. There will be room for everybody else. Doom, gloom, and the breathless predictions aside, there always has been.