When I was teaching myself how to program in new languages at my first office job in 1993 I had to save up to buy a book. Then I had to find a bookstore that had those kinds of books, which meant driving 35 minutes one way. Then I had to save up to buy the software.

I’d read the books at night after work and would think about the software I was going to write the next day in the office (couldn’t afford a computer yet and couldn’t install software on the library computer). I’d take my books into the office and then work on writing the software and testing it during the day.

I say all that to highlight how incredible it is that I can learn entirely new languages and tools by asking an LLM how something works.

The friction between imagining the solution to a problem and building that solution in incrementally useful steps has decreased by so many orders of magnitude over my career I can hardly imagine what life was like 30 years ago.