ESR is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI:
Yes, I’m still 12
I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.
And now I want to make you feel that, too.
In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.
Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone.
We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream.
We didn’t have version control. Public forge sites wouldn’t be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.
Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.
You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.
Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day.
Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test … and I’m still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!
This meditation isn’t supposed to be about me, though. It’s about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I’ve lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world’s knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn’t have said “never” (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn’t have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.
We’ve come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I’ve lived through and learned was just prologue.
