I love tools such as IntelliSense or Copilot, don't get me wrong!

But i still have a deep rooted fear that one day, developers will become so dependent on those luxuries, that we will become practically unable to write code on our own, without our cloud overlords blessings.

Until, you know.. the server for such a service will crash and no one will know how to fix it without its own help. *see Palpatine meme reference*

I mean I can't write machine code...

What would happen is we’d bring back better organized reference and it would take awhile for us to write code like back in the old days when languages were incredibly small and most of our day was not spent figuring out which class or method of a 1000 did what we wanted lol

@N00bPancakes remember how simple the borland shit was ? :P yet meanwhile concurrently they were already creating computer vision apparently !

To some extent, your fears are already coming true!

with dependency managers like Maven, Graddle, CMake, NPM, PIP and so on there's less and less people who know how to actually link libraries for their executables.

what if you had to make everything you ever did without dependency managers? Would you know how?

I can still write a Makefile for C++ on my own, but I haven't linked libraries in Java manually in over a decade for sure... and I don't even have a clue how npm organizes things so they don't conflict all the time!

extrapolating this into the future, we should eventually get to a point where losing/not having a dependency manager might literally by a blocker...

Can you write your shit in machine code? Probably not. You depend on software to do your job. There is no difference between being dependent on an IDE and a compiler, other than that the latter is a bit harder to break because it's thoroughly tested.

Copilot is entirely different from the category of IntelliSense and compilers, because it's online. All of a sudden you depend on having internet access, permissive firewall rules, and a whole service running "elsewhere" that you're not allowed to understand.

Many people have a very cumbersome illusion.

The illusion that they are independent...

To stay with your example... Do you _truly_ understand what a linker does? Eg. how it works in-depth, what flags it has etc cetera? I highly doubt it - even if you know how to link a library, if the linker fails you're done. XD

To go one-step further - we are already fully dependent on people with less knowledge than us and / or people who have an intellect far greater than us.

The material necessary for a CPU is e.g. highly likely mined by uneducated slaves, the knowledge necessary how an CPU works in depth know only a few I guess.

We are always dependent on someone or something else. Full independence is a myth. Even a redneck living in his bunker needs water and other resources which he cannot own by himself - nature is a shared resource ;)

Don't fear :)

@IntrusionCM In addition, dependence is great because it builds credit. If you depend on a resource someone else provides, they can be more or less sure you won't hurt them. If they also depend on something you provide you've asserted peace. If several people are dependent on the same resource they can trust each other to help if the resource requires maintenance and eliminating the dependency would be a greater effort than maintaining the resource. Dependence is the fundamental tool to ensure peace, if it's done right.

All, thank you for your responses!

I am aware that our trade, by design, is based on abstractions upon abstraction upon more abstraction, and it's completly normal and ok.

Every single (maybe almost) labor in this society depends on someone else's work. Even a traditional lumberjack needs a blacksmith for an axe.

But don't forget how much freedom and a weird form of independence comes from this domain of work. You don't like a library or tool? Fork them and make more suited to your taste (given that is open source). There is alwasy someone qualified to make some kind of alternative to anything, given that you are willing to expect a small cut on quality and a somehow different vision. Even propertary software has alternatives (i.e.Gimp, Inkscape, Krita etc for Adobe suite).

My fear is mostly replated to cloud services dependencies, but mostly to propertary, remote and pattented ones.

This being said, thanks again for taking your time to point that being dependent is not that bad!

Coding can definitely get obsolete, Engineers can't.

Couldn't agree more on this

@homo-lorens "dependence ensures peace" is an interesting thought. I don’t see how the peace aspect applies to development but it’s interesting nonetheless.

@Lensflare The second example applies, very important packages will be maintained unless maintenance and its coordination is a greater effort than everyone having to switch to something else. Codependence in programming is incredibly rare because we make an effort to keep shared packages problem oriented rather than focusing on the users.

@KennyTheBard

I think the easiest example is Open search vs Elasticsearch...

Both are far from innocent in their war...

But elastic made in my opinion one very dumb mistake: They pissed off the people who have far more capital than themselves - don't try to get money from people who have more money than you, to be more precise.

It's an interesting real time example of how "we need more money, we relicense to increase our income" (elastic) turned to "our competitors forked our product as they don't want to pay license costs and we have now created our own worst enemy...".

XD

In case it's not obvious - Amazon made a simple calculation: Pay license fees or hire few more devs to not pay license fees. Guess what. Devs are more lucrative - Red Hat / SAP for the same reason. Only good thing is that it seems as if OpenSearch becomes an open project, AWS / Amazon does not close it down.

And that's one of the reason I think that nothing can be not replaced. ..

Just piss of the wrong people and it will get replaced. Might take some time, but it will happen.

@IntrusionCM you know, i was thinking about an example just like that, only related to audacity and its recent forks.

It's true that there i always a bigger fish, but i can't see the predator for my predator as a friend... only as a delayed predator for myself.

Big Cash will never do somthing for our good, only to fatten their pockets, but maybe there is some kind of anwer in the banks of fish. Meaning open source scene.

I sure hope that we won't reach that level of licencing hell that we will have to fork and mentain each our own versions of the software we use everyday.

That’s pretty much a reversible thing and I said this before
Every major change in a persons standard just takes time to acclimate