Yes. I think coding is solved and has been for me in production since Claude Opus 4.5.
What is not solved is the question of how or why any particular piece of software serves human and business needs, or how it might be changed to do that better.
The combination of understanding both the human/business side and the computer operations side of a problem is still the domain of programmers, but we don't have to directly write that code now.
I think you misunderstood what the phrase actually means. You can only successfully manage or outsource a process once you understand it well enough to explain it. Therefore, most of the people doing agentic engineering are not following this Perlisim.
Oh, that's exactly what I meant, except its corollary. People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it. And we do.
> People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it.
I don’t think there’s such people.
Either you’re writing a software for the first time and so the premise is not true. Or you’re writing it a second time and what would be the point? Just reuse the code you already have.
Maybe we need a definition of “understanding how software works”. There’s the technical aspect (computation theory, computer organization, compilation, executable format, …) and there’s the necessity aspect (the domain).
The technical aspect can be learned although you can stop at the top of the abstraction tower (the programming language and its ecosystem). The domain aspect encompasses the whole world pretty much. Contributing to Blender does not qualify you to review a Krita patch. You have to learn the latter’s code first.
Is that ever true! I wrote a whole Medium article[0] about this, one of my most popular. It's called "YOU ARE BUGS" as a joke from Three Body Problem on Netflix.
It is? In what way is society being helped by Elon?
Admittedly, morals and values vary widely, along with the idea of "what is helping," but what Musk sells is transhumanist fantasy, technocracy, and a religion of surveillance and control by elite people.
Since you seem to be earnest here:
1. Tesla single-handedly spurred the widespread consumer adoption of electric cars.
2. He's the first person to ever get rockets to orbit and back - governments had been trying for years.
Yes space satellites will be used for surveillance, but you should be much more worried about your digital footprint than your physical one.
I dunno - there are people to be worried about as supervillains maybe. Musk doesn't seem like the worst of them.
You can argue with his values, but his impact... harder to do.
I definitely concede that he popularized electric cars in the modern era (they predated gasoline cars in invention) and I'm grateful for that.
But just as the US managed to kill the electric car the first time, no actual social benefit of electric cars is accruing here in the US. Is that Tesla's fault? Somewhat.
At his core, Elon lives his values. I don't think they're socially motivated.
There is significant value to reducing pollution (in human health and flourishing).
That said, GP comment is intellectually dishonest. It doesn't account for the negative externalities of his choices/politics that, as you correctly identify, are tied to his values.
I think his personal impact is overstated. Maybe I have a bad taste in my mouth from overzealous fanboys, but all I see is a manchild who likes scifi and tech, and threw a bunch of money he didn't work very hard to get in the first place at the right problem at the right time. The reason Tesla and SpaceX succeed is because of every person at the company besides Musk.
Have you forgotten Musk nearly sabotaging their own company with tweets tanking their stocks?
People are well incentivized to gas him up or they don't want to cross his cultists so it's just easier to go along with it. Just listen to him talk with confidence about something you know about and extrapolate rather than trusting what someone else is saying about him.
I have a Tesla with a Starlink mini inside it for rural area roadtripping. It has worked extremely well. For power I can plug into any electrical outlet I see or stay in RV parks with adapter plugs.
People may hate Elon but not seeing the value his companies brought to general people is willfully misunderstanding it in this case. And of course, without Tesla where would the electric car market be? Only the Chinese would have good EVs while the US falls ever behind and continues to ban them as they do now.
They did, actually, as Tesla entering the US is what spurred innovation from them, as the Chinese government pointed to Tesla as something native car makers should emulate. Before the introduction of Tesla in the Chinese market it wasn't nearly as good as today.
To my mind, that's evidence of China's long and effective history of copying innovation and scaling it up. That process is agnostic as to the source of the invention. If someone else had popularized electric cars, China would still be the dominant maker.
In other words, a person with Elon's demonstrated values isn't a requirement for inventing something important for society. I would argue that it holds back the actual potential of world-changing intentions if your personal values are about escaping this world because you have the money to do so, in your unrealistic sci-fi fantasy book world.
In the real world, not even a single person lives on the moon/Mars nor would benefit in any way from doing so, though their existence would be at great expense -- paid to Elon by taxpayers. So, no thanks.
I don't care what Elon personally believes as long as the tech he's making makes it out to general users. If anything, his companies are directly related to extraterrestrial territories like Starlink for Internet communication and electric vehicles and solar cells because there is no petroleum on Mars. So not sure why you're talking about his values like they mean anything (or don't).
Transhumanism is our certain future, it's not about Elon Musk, it will happen regardless with or without him pushing for it, when we know for a fact something is coming, better accelerate.
It would be delusional to think that we won't all have BCI or similar chips in the next let say 30 years, I mean which human would want to be left out and have no incomes and no interconnected capacity? Working individuals will not have a real choice (with a few exceptions of course). Realistically we will control every device around us (and agents) with our mind in the next decade.
One thing he does provide is a large amount of jobs (directly & indirectly).
Belief on one deterministic future is characteristic of all religions, which I why I labeled transhumanism that way. All religons are certain that they're inevitable and the folks who don't agree are delusional.
While it's certainly as valid as any other religion, I'm not signing up.
I can answer that one. They're public domain as a result of a trademark lapse by Hanna Barbera many years ago. Widely available and downloadable on the Internet archive.
The other day, I saw a guy get out of one in a store parking lot with his wife and kids.
I felt sorry for the kids. But not so much for the wife. She willingly chose this guy. The kids had no input but they still have to live with her decision.
Most kids love candy --- but that doesn't mean it's good for them.
The kids don't realize that dad blew $100k (or more) just to stroke his ego/image. Money that could have been more responsibly used for their college fund.
These are fascinating and everyone knows the iconic design styles this company developed.
Seen from 2026, the telegram messages with art revisions look just like the prompts we give to AI tools, "Put Greetings from Yellowstone under the bears and the big bear doesn't look right." They're terse, like tokens!
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