Two Analogies
I keep coming back to the analogy of agentic coding as cooking
a home cook can achieve a wide range of outcomes, from boiled eggs on toast (functional), to preparing holiday meals with and for the extended family (complex planning, coordination, flex, love)
we are in a global golden age of cooking
maybe only really achieved in the last 20 years1
people used to be limited to the knowledge of what their grandmas had the ability and opportunity to pass down
cookbooks, Julia Child, Martha Stewart, Yan Can Cook, Bourdain, cooking influencers like Uncle Roger
have made it possible for individuals to eat however, whatever they want
also the wide availability of ethnic ingredients (the Thai diaspora sells Thai basil grown in home gardens)
and dispersal of technology (thank you China, but the proliferation of manufactured tools started way before the rise of the People's Republic) such as pasta makers, bread machines, sushi mats
this post was sparked by vrypan's short X thread
another analogy I keep coming back to: the convergence of social status of coders and plumbers/electricians
apprentice-master continued learning style
can command $$$ for:
- obscure knowledge
- access to capital-expensive tools, and
- willingness to get hands dirty
asymmetry of technical knowledge with less informed purchasers
global dissemination of basic human knowledge. an immigrant-friendly and highly portable occupation
AI flattens (compresses) human knowledge. Just as we no longer say, "I made this meal from scratch but used a blender rather than a mortar-and-pestle" or "I put that together with assistance of a computer", in the future we will not distinguish knowledge work from trades/manual labor. It will just be, "Here, I made this".
growing up in ethnically diverse 80's America, every kid could be exposed to exotic ghee and kimchi. But only homemade, shared by a friend's mom↩