but note that GPT-2 launched when they were in middle school
And just like that, I am suddenly aware that I am positively geriatric in Programmer Years.
They mostly came away from Claude Code with the sense that this is a genuinely useful tool that they didn’t previously know, but the gut-level reaction here is: “I never knew that building software was so easy” rather than “It’s very impressive AI can do this.”
I’m sincerely afraid of what this looks like, at scale, across all disciplines. It used to be that there was a broadly linear relationship between how experienced you are at something and the results you get. Now, however, that relationship looks like a ‘___/’, with a Y-intercept that rises by the day. I don’t know whether I’d have been able to learn to code if, for the first ten years[1], I could’ve gotten unambiguously better results just by throwing my request into Claude code. I distinctly remember slaving away for a month on a toy Missile Command game, and being so happy when it finally worked. Objectively, I could’ve made a better game in two minutes by telling Claude what I wanted.
Of course, as a good rationalist, I have to play devil’s advocate. I had no resources when I was first learning, and my coding style was a complete mess. Nobody I asked knew how to help me, and Google-fu is something you learn as you go, so I couldn’t look up how to learn, either. Maybe I could’ve spent my early energy and enthusiasm more efficiently if I’d had an LLM on hand to tell me what “object-oriented programming” was, and that I didn’t need to write the same missile code five times over to instantiate five incoming missiles.
I’m sure this tradeoff exists, it’s not all bad, but I’m equally sure that there are people who could’ve learned to be programmers, or mathematicians, or artists, who won’t ever get the proper feedback curve to do so today. This is doubly true for interpersonal feedback—the flash game scene of the 00′s was a place where skill was scarce enough that everyone got feedback on their early work, because gamers were just happy to have another game. Claude can code the bottom 90 percent of Flash games effortlessly now, so everything under that bar no longer has an audience.
And just like that, I am suddenly aware that I am positively geriatric in Programmer Years.
I’m sincerely afraid of what this looks like, at scale, across all disciplines. It used to be that there was a broadly linear relationship between how experienced you are at something and the results you get. Now, however, that relationship looks like a ‘___/’, with a Y-intercept that rises by the day. I don’t know whether I’d have been able to learn to code if, for the first ten years[1], I could’ve gotten unambiguously better results just by throwing my request into Claude code. I distinctly remember slaving away for a month on a toy Missile Command game, and being so happy when it finally worked. Objectively, I could’ve made a better game in two minutes by telling Claude what I wanted.
Of course, as a good rationalist, I have to play devil’s advocate. I had no resources when I was first learning, and my coding style was a complete mess. Nobody I asked knew how to help me, and Google-fu is something you learn as you go, so I couldn’t look up how to learn, either. Maybe I could’ve spent my early energy and enthusiasm more efficiently if I’d had an LLM on hand to tell me what “object-oriented programming” was, and that I didn’t need to write the same missile code five times over to instantiate five incoming missiles.
I’m sure this tradeoff exists, it’s not all bad, but I’m equally sure that there are people who could’ve learned to be programmers, or mathematicians, or artists, who won’t ever get the proper feedback curve to do so today. This is doubly true for interpersonal feedback—the flash game scene of the 00′s was a place where skill was scarce enough that everyone got feedback on their early work, because gamers were just happy to have another game. Claude can code the bottom 90 percent of Flash games effortlessly now, so everything under that bar no longer has an audience.
I started very young; I’m not quite *that* old.