"rare good hn comment" -- kate
"As a C programmer I spent a lot of time creating custom collections: arrays, linked lists, ... Then in the 1990's, C++ with templates came along, and had it all built in. I feared this, initially: Some technical fears, e.g. would the compiler produce something reasonable? Deeper ones were psychological: Would I still have interesting work to do? Looking back on these worries makes me look silly. Of course there was interesting programming work left after I stopped manual collection creation. In fact, it forced me to level up, made me more productive. Today, I consider a language without built-in collections as inferior. Technology did this to all of us again and again. Banks had rooms full of human computers, calculating interests on paper. They were obsoleted by mainframes calculating a whole bank's worth of interests in less than a week. Then the spreadsheet came along, where people could simulate a week of finance batch runs in minutes. I think writing is safe. We will still value people capable of communicate a book worth of ideas. Only now there is a tool capable of taking angry word salad and turning it into readable sentences. We all have to go through an uncomfortable time leveling up, and in 5 years ChatGPT is the new normal and our worries will look silly."