← All IntelClip / EntertainmentPrinting press as parallel for democratized coding
From Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Why Coding Is Solved, and What Comes Next · ≈15:48
“in the 50 years after the first printing press, there was more literature published in Europe than in the thousand years before”
“software will be a thing that is fully democratized, that anyone can do”
“The best person to write accounting software, I think maybe even today, is not an engineer, it's a really good accountant because they know the domain really well and coding is the easy part.”
What’s in it
- The printing-press analogy for why AI democratizes software creation
- Why domain experts, not engineers, may write the best software
- A bold prediction: coding becomes universally accessible, fast
Clip transcript
history. This is what I read a lot of. I I think in tech history, there's one thing which I think to me is the clearest parallel for what's happening right now. And this is in the 1400s, the printing press in Europe. And what what happened was before the printing press, essentially 10% of the European population was literate. They knew how to read and write. They were often employed by like kings and lords that were not literate. And their job was to you know, their their job was to read and write and this is not something that everyone knew how to do. >> [snorts] >> The printing press was invented, then there were two more presses and in the 50 years after the first printing press, there was more literature published in Europe than in the thousand years before. And over the same period, the cost of literature, the cost of a book went down like a 100x. And then, you know, it took a couple hundred years cuz you know, learning to read and write is hard. You need education systems and government and everyone can't be working on farms and so on. But over the next few hundred years, literacy globally went up to like 70%. And so, you know, now we can all read and write and you don't need a a degree in reading and writing to know how to read and write. Although still there are professional writers and that is a thing that you can do. So, I I think the thing that's about to happen and it's going to be much faster than 50 years is software will be a thing that is fully democratized, that anyone can do. And you know, there's a lot of corollaries to this. So, for example, let's say you're writing accounting software. The best person to write accounting software, I think maybe even today, is not an engineer, it's a really good accountant because they know the domain really well and coding is the easy part. It's knowing the domain that's the hard part. And I I think this is just obviously the the future.
Comments
Sign in to comment.
Loading comments…