Deep Blue: Chess vs Programming

I remember how dismayed Kasparov was after losing the 1997 match to IBM's Deep Blue, although his views on Deep Blue became more balanced with time and he accepted that we had entered a new era in which computers would outperform grandmasters at chess.

Still, chess players can take comfort in the fact that chess is still played between humans. Players make their name and fame by beating other humans because playing against computers is no longer interesting as a competition.

Many software developers would like to have similar comfort. But that comfort is harder to find, because unlike chess, building prototypes or PoCs is not seen as a sport or art form. It is mostly seen as a utility. So while brain-coding a PoC may still be intellectually satisfying for the programmer, to most other people it only matters that the thing works. That means that programmers do not automatically get the same protected space that chess players have, where the human activity itself remains valued even after machines become stronger. The activity programmers enjoy may continue but the recognition and economic value attached to it may shrink.

So I think the big adjustment software developers have to make is this: The craft will still exist and we will still enjoy doing it but the credit and value will increasingly go to those who define problems well, connect systems, make good product decisions and make technology useful in messy real-world situations. It has already been this way for a while and will only become more so as time goes by.

This note reproduces a recent comment I posted in a Lobsters forum thread about LLM-assisted software development at at lobste.rs/s/qmjejh.

See also: Three Inverse Laws of AI and Robotics.