Warranty Void If Regenerated by Scott Werner (via Valentine):
His shop was in a corrugated steel building on Highway 29, between a feed store and a Laundromat. It had a waiting area with four plastic chairs and a coffee machine that Tom had specified himself and which made coffee that was, by consensus of his clients, exactly adequate and no better. He’d tried to improve the spec three times. Each time, the regenerated firmware made the coffee subtly worse in a different way. He’d eventually concluded that coffee machine specs existed at the exact intersection of fluid dynamics, thermal management, and taste (three domains where natural language was particularly poor at capturing the relevant distinctions) and had stopped trying. He had, however, found a use for it: when new clients came in insisting that the software they’d generated was “basically fine” and “just needs a little tweak,” he would gesture at the coffee machine and say, “I’ve been trying to get that thing to make decent coffee for two years. You think your sixty-parameter irrigation optimizer is going to be simpler?” This was usually effective. People understood coffee.
A story about what it could look like when everyone generates their own software, how anyone can fix stuff but not everyone will do so in a way that’s maintainable or safe, and how the truest repairman will also repair man.
Computer mechanics is already a thing: the people who get called in to fix printers or set up computers when they’re really borked. So why not software? I think the customization stuff really will happen like this, just because it’ll be that easy. The machine can optimize, but that’s not the only thing that matters.
People who understand how things work will still be required, but maybe more like mechanics than the pure programmers of today. At the end of the day, humans get fired, not genies, so we gotta keep ourselves in the driving seat.