Just a hobby

It's always the same one. The doubter, the sensible one, the one who crosses their arms and drops the question looking like they just invented it. And who's going to maintain all that? Millions of people with no training coding millions of applications, patches upon patches, security holes everywhere. Chaos. They say it convinced that's the crack where the ship sinks.

Bad news: the question is seventy years old and it always lost.

When FORTRAN appeared, the assembly coders laughed in its face. Machine-generated code, they said, bloated, slow, impossible to maintain, that's not programming, that's losing control of the machine. When C arrived, same thing. With Python, again. Every abstraction layer was born insulted by the layer below, always accused of the same thing, of bringing disorder and sloppiness. And you know what? Today nobody, not even the purest purist, reads the assembly their compiler spits out. Nobody. That layer swallowed all the complexity below and buried it forever.

AI is the next step. The prompt is the new source code, and what it generates is the assembly you're no longer going to read. Nothing new under the sun, just one more step on the same ladder we've been climbing since the fifties.

And if the analogy doesn't work for you, I'll give you a real case. The best of all.

In 1991 a Finnish student bought himself a 386. He had a free compiler at hand, GCC, which Stallman and the GNU folks had been giving away to the world for years along with almost everything else. Almost, because they were missing the centerpiece, the kernel. And that kid, fed up with the limitations of a toy operating system whose author refused to let it grow, started coding his own. In his room. For fun. He compiled it with GCC and dropped it on the net with a note that was almost endearing*: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)."

Just a hobby. Won't be big. That's what Linus Torvalds wrote about the kernel that today runs half the internet, most of the phones on the planet, and almost all the servers serving you what you're reading.

And the priesthood, of course, reacted the way it always reacts. A prestigious professor explained to him in an open letter* that his design was obsolete, amateur, that everything was wrong. "Linux is obsolete," in those exact words. The expert had his technical reasons, he wasn't stupid. But he was looking at the finger. What he didn't see, and I think it's what the tower defender never sees, is that the tool was already out there, free, and when that happens the craft stops being a privilege and becomes a Saturday afternoon.

The security chaos thing has its answer in your pocket. Right now you're carrying forty apps made by people you don't know at all, and nothing happens. Why? Because the phone locks each one in its cell: it can't read what's next door, it doesn't touch the camera or microphone without asking your face. That's the sandbox, and nobody asked you to pass an exam to install it. They didn't put security in the user, they put it underneath. You don't learn it: you inherit it from the ground you walk on.

I wrote it in the two previous entries and here I close it. First was the custom software boom. Then, the era of personal software, when the cost of creating collapses and, far from making less, we make more, much more. And this is the end of the story, or the next chapter, and the objections they raise are the same old objections, the same ones they raised against the compiler, against Linux. The disorder they warn you about is real. But it doesn't matter, because the next step always swallowed it.

I'm convinced AI is the compiler of this era. So next time you hear someone ask who's going to maintain such a mess, remember the Finnish kid with the 386.