For most people writing software for a living that is gone

As my brother said once with exasperation: "I got into this business to write code, and now I'm just an integrator."

I agree with you. There's a saying in Korea and East Asia: 'Open source is a moat.' This might sound difficult, but it means that if you're trying to sell a product, its quality or UX/UI basically needs to be better than what's already publicly available in open source — and that's not easy. As the era becomes increasingly advanced, the cognitive cost of making a single project public keeps rising. But if you try to use an LLM to share or assist, there are many people who say LLMs are bad. It's a difficult problem

Reminds me of when Jensen Huang recently compared Linux to OpenClaw and showed this ridiculous GitHub star comparison. To me these projects are incomparable.

In a previous post I lamented that my I should no longer call myself a software developer - after all, I write my own code! Maybe there should be a distinction between software creators and programmers.

> “… will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code.” I’m sure you’re right. Though, let me add, there are a lot of minuscule problems in the small business space. Not fame and fortune level, but gratifying nevertheless.

> Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation. Yes, but this also has a silver lining: nobody will need to do the rote, toily, plumbingeque, but still economically valuable work that most software engineers spent most of their time on, which means they will be freed up to solve drastically more novel and/or higher level problems. The obvious issues with this are 1) not everybody is a Carmack or a Bellard; 2) not everybody may want to be, either; and 3) you most likely won't get to be them by outsourcing all your coding to an LLM (meaning we would need to rethink upskilling.) The short term will be painful, but in the long term, Economics theory suggests we would experience a golden age of productivity and progress once we build the pipeline of novel / higher-level problems to solve and upskill the hobbyi…

It took me many years to even think of problems that I wanted to solve. Or were missing. But eventually it happened. And it seems that the more time passes the more that list of ideas just expands since no one can follow up on all of those ideas. Someone skilled enough should have many original enough problems to work on. But such persons would have to speak on that topic.

>Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve AGI is an interesting one.