Douglas Adams basically predicted Wikipedia on smartphones, and I suspect we are only a few years away from babelfish ear buds.

> I can ask an agent to add OAuth, you can ask one to add caching, and somebody else can ask one to rebuild the database from first principles and make the UI pink. Each change can be reasonable in isolation.

But this is just bad vibecoding? This would be bad if humans did it too. With agents or humans, you need to coordinate.

the tower keeps rising but the elevator pitch for every new floor is 'it solves the problems created by the floor below it'

The agent will always fill in the gaps in your understanding. It's not a compiler. It's categorically different from any of the other ways we've built software.

I'm not sure reading code is coming back. The ritual of reading code must come back, because that's the only way to build products that don't collapse under their own incoherence, both technically and visibly.

"just ask Claude" is fine, but it's not the end state

Three or so years ago, Omar, the creator of DSpy pointed out on Twitter that ~LLMs get better most by better internal collaboration. Wish I could find it.

It seems to me that LLMs and particularly chatbots have already allowed for bigger scale collaboration within the LLM companies versus what was possible within the prior cohort of big platform companies.

Has the result just been taller towers, or actually a change of what is possible?

Does it really keep rising? Many of my fondest memories of technology come from times past...

I don't know why people hold on to all this extra software and features when with the tools its easier than ever to strip that out and refactor the end product in to a much more compact deliverable. Maybe once upon a time it was useful to keep legacy parts of the software solution around, but it can be recreated with fresh eyes if needed given the power of the new LLM models. My philosophy is if its not needed, it needs to be removed.

AI replaces a single tower with millions of 5-over-1s[1]. The aggregate height, and speed of construction mind-boggling, but when each building is considered individually, not very impressive.

1. Perhaps with a handful of skyscrapers sprinkled in.

This could've been a much better article without the strained Tower of Babel article.

This reminds me of Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon". You really should read it (and all of TC's works)!