It's interesting how most of the comments here seem to miss the most important part of the article, which is this:
> What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
A little but further reinforced by this:
> I am just barely old enough that my first job title was “System Administrator”. [...] I lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure cattle.
What is happening now is nothing new, we have seen it many times before: a shift in technology which is bringing changes in the ecosystem, required skills and so on. This happened with stocking frames, steam engines [1], automobiles, servers, and now the code. Just like before, many will be - and already are - harmed by this, but ultimately the world will adapt and accept the new paradigm.
[1] There's an infamous screenshot of a tweet being shared around, where someone suggests various names for writing code without AI, and someone else responds with "software engineering". Allow me to add my on contribution to this debate: codejamming.
I've been using it about 8 hours a day. That's because for every two minutes of working with it I need to wait about a minute for it to give something back.
The truth is that software engineering, as a profession, is not even a full hundred years old. Even if someone spent their all career with it, it has probably changed so much over time that it became a completely different job.
> A Python4 that actually used typing in the interpreter, had value types, had a comptime phase to allow most metaprogramming to work (like monkey patching for tests) would be great! It would be faster, cleaner, easier to reason about, and still retain the great syntax and flexibility of the language.
And what prevents someone from designing such a language?
> python code could be so much faster if it didn't have to assume everything could change at any time
Definitely, but then it wouldn't be Python. One of the core principles of Python's design is to be extremely dynamic, and that anything can change at any time.
There are many other, pretty good, strictly dynamically typed languages which work just as well if not better than Python, for many purposes.
But the plot can't be copyrightable, as the copyright applies only to a tangible representation of an idea (e.g. written text), and not to an idea itself.
Code is one thing, but what about writing? There is no 100% foolproof way to identify content written by LLMs, and human writing routinely gets incorrectly flagged as such. If I write a book, and a checker says that it's written by LLM, is it automatically in the public domain?
> it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles
There is nothing borderline about that - the German cultural space (including very much the countries of former Habsburg Empire) is still completely obsessed with titles and formal positions despite many of them losing any practical importance in modern times.
Yet...