What was the bill mentioned in the previous post ? Who was it sent to? Who pays it?
The answer may be a little ironic:
The bill was sent directly to our eyes and brains.
The software engineering world has held a consensus for decades: typing was never the bottleneck.
Python became one of the world’s most popular languages in part because its creator, Guido van Rossum, designed it around the idea that “code is read much more often than it is written .”
Uncle Bob gave us an even more striking ratio in his book Clean Code: engineers spend ten times as long reading old code as writing new code .
The miracle of AI is that it reduces the 10% cost of typing to almost nothing. But the trap of AI is that it dumps the remaining 90% of cognitive capacity on you, until you crash or give up.
For the past two or three decades, the entire software world has been trying every possible way to reduce the “burden of reading and understanding.” Now AI has reversed that direction.
This is not productivity. It is a “review tax.”
When we spend huge amounts of time every day racing through the endless cycle of reading, debugging, and telling AI to rewrite things, are we really any closer to our destination?
Or are we simply running, increasingly out of breath, on a treadmill that keeps getting faster?