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Before I got my first full time software engineering gig (I had worked part time briefly years prior) I was working full time as a carpenter. We were paying for an expensive online work order system. Having some previous experience writing software for music in college and a couple /brief/ LAMP stack freelance jobs after college I decided to try to write my own work order system. It took me like a month and it would never have never scaled, was really ugly, and had the absolute minimum number of features. I could never had accepted money from someone to use it but it did what we needed and we ran with it for several years after that.

I was only able to do this because I had some prior programming experience but I would imagine that if AI coding tools get a bit better they would enable a larger cohort of people to build a personal tool like I did.

I don't think his quote is that extreme and it was definitely not obvious to most people. A common thing you heard even around 95 was "I've tried internet but it was nothing special".

> basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative.

That sounds pretty similar to long-distance phone calls? (which I'm sure was transformative in its own way, but not on nearly the same scale as the internet)

Do we actually know how transformative the general population of 1995 thought the internet would or wouldn't be?

In 1995 in France we had the minitel already (like really a lot of people had one) and it was pretty incredible, but we were longing for something prettier, cheaper, snappier and more point to point (like the chat apps or emails).

As soon as the internet arrived, a bit late for us (I'd say 1999 maybe) due to the minitel's "good enough" nature, it just became instantly obvious, everyone wanted it. The general population was raving mad to get an email address, I never heard anyone criticize the internet like I criticize the fake "AI" stuff now.

>> Consider the restaurant owner from earlier who uses AI to create custom inventory software that is useful only for them. They won’t call themselves a software engineer.

I have a suspicion this is LLM text, sounds corny. There are dozens open source solutions, just look one up.