Software engineering is currently artisanal, but AI is making software much cheaper to make. What can we learn from the history of industrial design? Can we bring taste into a world of programming no longer dominated by artisans?
OR: if we were playing by Settlers of Catan rules, I'd be dead already
A few months ago, I wrote about the deep weirdness of LLM technology, and how we’re all still learning how to approach its outputs. The marketing and popular perception of these models is that of a helpful robot assistant, and leaning into that characterisation is also a core part of what makes the technology useful in ways that straightforward text completion models weren’t. By pretending to be a robot assistant, modern instruct models/chatbots are able to perform many digital tasks one might want a (digital) robot assistant to perform.