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i wonder if this is how engineers felt when the first electronic calculators came out and engineers stopped doing math by hand.

did we feel uneasy that a new generation of builders didn't have to solve equations by hand because a calculator could do them?

i'm not sure it's the same analogy but in some ways it holds.

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The analogy would hold if there were 2 or 3 calculator companies and all your calculations had to be sent to them.

If local models get good enough, I think it’s a very different scenario than engineers all over the world relying on central entities which have their own motives.

google/gemma-4-31B-it is honestly "good enough". It requires more than your current laptop for now, but it's not remotely inaccessible (especially if you're a SWE in the US)

I think calculator is the wrong analogy. Go further back before even mainframes, when their were just a handful of purpose-built computers.

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