Hello World!

It first clicked for me maybe ten or twelve weeks ago. You know the moment I’m talking about — that instant when the penny drops, the lights turn on, and the pitter-patter of your everyday thoughts takes on a mercurial quality. You’re never quite sure what the catalyst was when that moment happens, but it’s an unmistakeable burst where suddenly that which you hadn’t seen is standing — starkly, brazenly, clearly — right in front of you.

The thing which abruptly deigned to reveal itself to me was that the development of software was…changing. Except “changing” wasn’t a bold enough descriptor. The trusses and pillars and poured concrete foundations of how we build software, including the tools that we use and even the people who do the building, were all morphing, in real-time, right before my eyes.

The reason for said change was, as I think we all know by now (and most likely, why you’re reading this), artificial intelligence. Or, at least, LLMs. Or, transformer neural networks. Or, something that a bunch of folks had been working on for what seemed like decades, except now its gradual had become sudden and all at once. And it mattered. A lot.

It isn’t really important what we call it, or how finely we choose to draw the distinctions of what makes it what it is. It’s AI, and if you’re in software development and paying even the slightest bit of attention, you know something is happening.

All of which brings me to this newsletter.

As I looked around at the approximately four gajillion AI newsletters that already existed, I never quite found what I was looking for. Sure, you can get your daily digest of news links, job postings, and resource lists. And yes, you can sort through exponentially growing projects on GitHub. All of those things are useful and wonderful and whatnot.

But those things are not this.

What I’m aiming for here is a semi-regular digest that provides context, history, analysis, and -yes- questioning of how AI is going to impact software development and the people who do the developing.

The proliferation of tools and IDEs and plugins and add-ons and APIs seems to be growing by the nanosecond, and, as such, it seems that we’re occasionally going to need to take a step back (or up, or out) and gain a larger frame of reference. That is what this newsletter is about, and the community that cares about that stuff is who this newsletter is for.

If that’s you, I hope you’ll continue reading. And, maybe, if you get a minute, pass this on to a person or two who you think might also care.

We’re at the beginning of what I suspect is a many-year transformation of software itself. Indeed, this may be the biggest change in software since software first began. That was back on June 11th, 1948, when Tim Kilburn ran the first piece of software to solve a fairly standard mathematical calculation, thus kicking off the era of punch card computing.

If this moment is even remotely as important as that moment, then, we’re all going to need spaces to discuss, to write, to read and to contribute. With any luck, this space might turn out to be helpful, or even useful. At the very least, this newsletter will serve to help us all collectively discover the actual importance of this moment.