There's always one. The doubter, the sensible one, the guy who folds his arms and drops the question like he just invented it. And who's going to maintain all that? Millions of people with no trade banging out millions of apps, patches on patches, security holes everywhere. A shambles. He says it dead certain that's the crack the whole ship sinks through.

Bad news: the question is seventy years old, and it has lost every single time.

When FORTRAN showed up, the ones hand-cranking assembly laughed in its face. Machine-generated code, they said, bloated, slow, impossible to maintain; that's not programming, that's losing control of the thing. When C arrived, same story. With Python, again. Every rung of abstraction was born insulted by the rung below it, accused of the same crime every time: dragging in the mess, the botch-job. And you know what? Today nobody, not even the biggest purist, reads the assembly their compiler spits out. Nobody. That layer swallowed all the complexity underneath and buried it for good.

AI is the next rung. The prompt is the new source code, and what it generates is the assembly you're never going to read. Nothing new under the sun. Just one more step up the same ladder we've been climbing since the fifties.

And if the analogy doesn't sell you, here's a real case. The best one there is.

In 1991 a Finnish student bought himself a 386. He had a free compiler on hand, GCC, which Stallman and the GNU crowd had spent years giving away to the world along with nearly everything else. Nearly, because they were missing the piece in the middle, the kernel, the core of the system. And that kid, fed up with the limits of a toy operating system whose author refused to let it grow, sat down to bang out his own. In his bedroom. For fun. He compiled it with GCC and dropped it on the net with a note you couldn't help but warm to*: "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 nearly every server handing you these words.

And the priesthood, of course, reacted the way it always reacts. A distinguished professor explained to him, in an open letter*, that his design was obsolete, amateur, all wrong. "Linux is obsolete," in those very words. The expert had his technical reasons; he wasn't a fool. But he was staring at the finger and missing the moon. What he didn't see, and I reckon it's what the man defending the tower never sees, is that the tool was already out on the street, free, and once that happens the trade stops being a privilege and turns into a Saturday afternoon.

The security-chaos thing has its answer in your pocket. Right now you're carrying forty apps built by people you've never met, and nothing happens. Why? Because the phone locks each one in its own cell: it can't read what the app next door is doing, can't touch the camera or the mic without asking you to your face. It's the sandbox, and nobody made you sit an exam to install it. The security wasn't put on the user; it was baked in underneath. You don't learn it. You inherit it from the ground you stand on.

I wrote it in the two previous entries, and I'll close it here. First came the custom-software boom. Then the era of personal software, when the cost of building collapses and, far from making less, we make more. Much more. And this is the end of the tale, or the next chapter, and the objections thrown at it are the same as always, the very ones thrown at the compiler, at Linux. The mess they warn you about is real. But it doesn't matter, because the next rung 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 godawful mess, remember the Finn with the 386.