10,870 karma · joined March 19, 2009
So, my measure is not just line of code. It's deployable features. And yes, by that measure, we have gone from zero to "lots" in a very short time.
For sake of comparison, consider e-commerce. As a proxy for "impact on the economy", we can use Amazon's revenue. They went public in 1997 and that year had revenue of $148M (just 0.14% of Walmart's revenue that year). By 2000, revenue was $2.76B (1.65% of Walmart). Bricks and mortar didn't start feeling anything until probably 2011, when Amazon crossed 11% of Walmart's revenue. And it wasn't until 2025 that Amazon finally surpassed Walmart.
But, if you worked in tech in the e-commerce business, things were already feeling pretty hot by 2007. And at that point in time, the e-commerce sector was still miniscule compared to traditional retail (~4%). Software is very exciting these days and the most fantastic things are happening. They will eventually percolate out to the rest of the economy. But it will take many years before everyone notices the difference.
Q: Do the iServices like iCloud, App Store, etc work? A: No, at least not yet. They possibly require something iOS refers to as the “Legacy FairPlay Key Descrambler” AES (hardware) command.
Extremely subtle hint. Well played.
Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.
While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.
But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
I think this problem will be solved. Frontier models recently learned how to do 3D really well (Astra was first on 3D; Opus-5.5 nailed it weeks later). How long before they get trained up on product management? It won't be long. Sorry.
In other words, the crisis in mathematics (as I read it) is that AI can solve without teaching. The result may be impressive, but if the only beings that can move math forward in future are machines grinding away on billions of scenarios that no human would have the patience to undertake, this leaves those in the profession wondering about their place in it.
[1] https://polymarket.com/event/nato-x-russia-military-clash-in... [2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/41238/when-will-russia-a...
Each ceremony is recorded on video and distributed to the public. The last one was in August, 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QqYS3oLfL8&t=1s
It appears that even very large companies like Cloudflare may need to brush up on customer experience from time to time.