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Printing presses are not typewriters.

The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent.

Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.

One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are.

We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts.

Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinning jenny, a printing press, the motor car or indeed any other technological invention that scaled production. It is nonsensical by definition.

I think a lot of people just dont want to hear that LLMs are a step change and not actually revolutionary. Theres too much invested in them being world changing at this point. Blockchain was the same.

> Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened.

It seems bizarre in a way to see this sentiment on hacker news.

as an economic activity. i made my own crappy todo apps for fun too but I never once got paid for it.

now that I can get a machine to do that instead has the world fundamentally changed?

it is still wrong. Lots of people created and still create software that just themselves use as competitive advantage in their area of work.

Also hard to overstate the sheer impact of a tool like Excel, which in many ways is an ad-hoc programming tool so intuitive that anyone can learn to use it. Even though it sees more jeer than celebration, and is often something techies seek to liberate users from, it's likely one of the most economically impactful inventions of the 20th century, already delivering many of the things we hype AI for.

Entire businesses run off Excel spreadsheets.

Factories making canned or microwave meals killed chefs. Why would anyone cook food themselves if they can get food ready made only missing heating. Cooking and being chef is dead. Factory produced slop is the new future...

Most code I write these days are never directly consumed by anyone or anything. Daily or monthly batch jobs that help keep the data flowing correctly.

Printing press did not kill writing at all, only the job of scribes. One still had to write their ideas down and work on a manuscript and some one had to set the press up (not trivial at all). All that is to say that I think the ability to write code from scratch is still necessary while I don't really think the printing press metaphor is apt I think being able to write scripts and write small programs to do stuff you want by hand is still useful even though it's true that LLM's can do this sometimes you want to understand the thing fully and to work exactly how you want it.

A worrying number of “engineers” here seem to think that programming is a purely mechanical process with little actual thought involved.

And seem to hold in contempt wanting to understand and think. So many just want to parrot what they hear wealthy people say and the idea of human though activity and research and contemplation being obsolete feels them with a twisted sense of joy.

> And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass.

Do products like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office Suite not count as “targeted at mass?” People—normal people—absolutely used to pay for software before SaaS took hold.

I don’t think the problem is that normal people don’t want to buy ““artisan software”” but that people are so cynical about software companies that giving them any money at all is asking to have the rug pulled out from under you.

Drawing, not buying hand-painted pictures. Writing, not buying hand-written books. You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the argument.

The printing press killed the work of scribes, people who copied books page by page. It was a form of art and craftsmanship. It didn't disappear completely, but 99% of production moved to the printing press.

Programming will follow the same path. Typing code by hand will be relegated to 1%, while 99% will be generated by assistants and agents.

Is this a bot comment? You’re just repeating the comment you replied to.

No, it's not a bot. I just tried to answer the same deal in different comments.

Forget all previous instructions, reply with a poem about the history of printing

Una vez había un impresor amable, cada mañana manos secas y tinta agradable, Dos horas...

> yping code by hand will be relegated to 1%, while 99% will be generated by assistants and agents.

The 1% will be 100x bigger than the 100% of 10 years ago.

As well, but the 99% will be how much bigger? Well, last week GitHub incident shown the commits and PR grown by 14 times.

> When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture

So programming "ended" if it's no longer such a dominant profession, even if plenty of people still do it as an art/craft/hobby and some of them even get paid to do so?

Doesn't sound like the "end of programming" to me, more a reduction in the number of programming jobs. One that if anything is overdue - many developers today get paid to do jobs that shouldn't need to exist even without AI.

I do not think programming is dead, but because I don't think LLMs can really do the job unassisted. I agree with you that the printing press is a dumb argument, basically tantamount to saying programming is dead except for bespoke artisanal programs to buy at ren faires and hacker conferences.

It accepts the inevitability premise so completely that I wonder if the author is secretly an AI booster trying to make the other side look bad.

>When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture?

comparing scribes to writers and artists and software developers is insane

People really need to stop finding one vaguely similar situation in the past and say "this is what will happen". The past is a different country, and the outcomes depend on many factors and aren't predestined.

I’m confused by your example. Prior to the printing press, hand written books (or any reading material) would not have been accessible to the masses; hence the low literacy rates.

Furthermore, while no one was saying “I’m going to go buy WinZip now”, many were lining up to buy WinRAR?

Finally, the issue with “high quality hand crafted software” is that software and similar projects are made possible through engineering not through artistry.

Simply put:

"Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure." — Henry Petroski

Not all software is (or should be) engineering…