The Many Ends of Programming - Ray Myers
Jun 10, 2025 · 27:12
Ray Myers, Chief Architect at All Hands AI, argues that the future of software engineering is not predetermined and we have a say, categorizing competing visions into six distinct endgames: extreme completion, dev apocalypse (innovator's paradise), abstraction leap, uncharted waters, review economy, and infinite pile of garbage. He illustrates extreme completion with a real example where an AI agent generated a 48-file pull request from a Slack message, and abstraction leap via domain-specific languages (DSLs) shown in the Parcel paper’s 61 prompts producing a 220-line Lisbon interpreter. Myers warns that dev apocalypse is desirable but not yet feasible, while the review economy is a pit stop where manual review bottlenecks must be managed using Theory of Constraints. He cites contradictory studies: UpLevel found developers with coding assistants had higher bug rates, while GitHub Copilot claimed improved quality; he notes 2024 was the first year copy-pasted code exceeded refactored code, a red flag for tech debt. Ultimately, Myers urges deliberate choices: whether we want no programmers or everyone to be a programmer, and whether we prioritize quality over quantity.
