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My biggest takeaway from “LLMs are useful for some aspects of writing software, and lots of people like it” is still that the existing tools we made for writing software are bad. 🧵👇

The last 20 years were spent on ever more complex layer cakes of frameworks, humongous IDEs and more new and “improved” programming languages that I can count—yet many programmers prefer a chatbot over them.

How did the tools get so bad? It’s a mixture of ego-driven hubris, gate-keeping and tech-wanking. I think both proprietary platforms and open source have been harmful to quality; both contributing to cancerous cruft, overwhelming complexity and toxic environments.

The sheer amount of knowledge a developer has to have to implement even a trivial application today is mind-boggling when compared to to say the 1990s. And most of this knowledge isn’t about deep technical topics or about software design; it’s wrestling with ever-changing deep fried layer cakes.