Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…That’s actually exactly right. So I did actually a keynote at RailsConf 10 years ago, where I called myself a software writer. I mean, I’m not the first person to say that. “Software writer” has been in the vernacular for a long time. But the modern identity that most programmers adopt when they’re trying to be serious is software engineer, and I reject that label. I’m not an engineer. Occasionally, I dabble in some engineering, but the vast majority of the time, I’m a software writer. I write software for human consumption and for my own delight. I can get away with that because I’m working in a high-level language like Ruby, working on collaboration software and to-do lists and all the other stuff. Again, if I was trying to apply my talent to writing 3D game engines, no, that’s not the right mindset. That’s not the right identity. But I find that the software engineering identity flattens things a little bit. I’d like to think that we have software writers and software mathematicians, for example, and then those are actually richer ways of describing the abstraction level that you’re working at than “engineer.” Yeah. And I think if AI becomes more and more successful, I think we’ll need the software writer skill more and more because it feels like that’s the realm of which… Because it’s not writer. You’re going to have to do the software, you’re going to have to be a computer person, but there’s a more… I don’t know. I just don’t want to romanticize it, but it’s more poetic, it’s more literary. It more feels like writing a good blog post than- I actually wish that AI had a bit higher standards for writing. I find the fact that it accepts my slobby, incomplete sentences a little offensive. I wish there was a strict mode for AI where it would snap my fingers if I was just feeding it keywords and like, “Speak proper. Do pronunciation, do punctuation.” Because I love that. I love crafting a just-right sentence that hasn’t been boiled down, that has no meat on it, has no character in it. It’s succinct, it’s not overly flowery. It’s just right. That writing phase to me is just addictive. And I find that when programming is the best, it’s almost equivalent exactly to that. You also have to solve a problem. You’re not just communicating a solution. You have to actually figure out what are you trying to say. But even writing has that. Half the time when I start writing a blog post, I don’t know exactly which arguments I’m going to use; they develop as part of the writing process. And that’s how writing software happens too. You know roughly the kind of problem you’re trying to solve. You don’t know exactly how you’re going to solve it. And as you start typing, the solution emerges.…

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