iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Everybody is a software developer now.

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So when young people are asking me if they should train to be a developer or a designer, I'm generally telling them to consider training to be a electrician or plumber instead. Because those jobs tend to be fairly well paid (at the moment) and are likely to be the last ones to be disrupted.

However the irony is that now it's coming for white collar / middle class knowledge work (because does knowledge work make sense if something is trained on all the worlds knowledge), and traditional tradespeople (builders, sparkies, plumbers etc) are looking pretty comfortable right now.

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I think that when it was a blue collar / working class problem, white collar / middle class workers would explain that that's just the march of progress and they needed to retrain.

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So I don't think we're that far away from "lights off" product teams. Which you could argue is the white collar equivalent of the move from hot metal type to DTP in the newspaper industry, but spread across a much larger surface area.

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I don't know about not needing anyone, but I do think we're heading for a period of mass underemployment, along with a massive concentration of wealth amongst ever smaller numbers of people. So it's gonna get crunchy in the next 20 years, unless we suddenly create a whole new set of opportunities.

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I think for non critical tools I'm OK with that. Less OK with that for things like aircraft of powerstation control systems, international banking, government etc. But we're also reaching a point where those same LLMs are able to exploit the human weaknesses added to those same systems.

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I think a lot of code bases are now unmaintainable by humans. But I think a lot of them were so complex that they were getting that way anyway. Hence the spiralling of tech debt. So we're now relying on machine to maintain them and just hoping they can do a good enough job.

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So we better hope that we don't discover some new millennium bug only to find that the equivalent of all the old Cobol programmers have retired.

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As long as classic cars still exist there will still be need for experienced mechanics. Like the two 80 year olds who have a garage on my street. But when they die, nobody is rushing to take their place. So we are going to suffer significant skiils loss.

Cars are now a lot more complex. But they are also now made of disposable black box parts. So these days a mechanic can plug in their laptop, run a diagnostic, find the fault, change the whole black box part (without worrying how the black box actually worked).

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Pseudo code might be enough. I see this a little like car mechanics. Back in the day my dad knew exactly how an engine worked, so he could strip it down and rebuild it if he wanted. That was party experience but also partly due to mechanical simplicity.

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So for instance they might still be responsible for directing a flock of agents and they may need a conceptual level of understanding how software systems get built and the problems that occure. But they may never need to write a line of code. So may never need to actually learn to code.

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The analogy might also be wrong and there's a chance that we might need even more. However I think that's unlikely. Because I think LLMs are "democratising engineering work". Now we might still hire people we call AI Driven Engineers, but they might not have the same skillsets.

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However the thing with analogies is that they are not the same. They just have some overlapping characteristics. So if we assume that there are now 90% fewer milkmen than there once were, this analogy isn't stating that there will be 90% less developers. Could be 70%, 50% or 20% fewer.

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We still have milkmen (and blacksmiths and steam engineers). Just nowhere near as many as we had 100 years ago say. That's the point I'm taking from the analogy.

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Could have chosen black-smithery or steam-engine engineers instead, as there is more skill involved, but possible less amusing.

The deeper point being that much like milkmen or telephone operators, the need for developers in the future will be greatly diminished.

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“To my mind there's a clear qualitative difference between the domain expertise needed by a milkman vs a senior developer.” I think that’s why I liked the comment. Because the ridiculousness of the comparison (which incidentally lessons the pain), lies a deeper truth.

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Maybe you could spell the point out, as I don’t really understand the issue here?

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Did it again and got this. Think some of the questions are off to be honest, but I'm, happy to be with Sweden and NZ.

Not sure what I think about this?

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See also designers and design

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You shouldn't feel guilty about pleasure :)

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Yep, I agree. First 4 or 5 episodes felt like a slog as they basically reset things. But it did get going towards the end. So interested to see where they take the final series.

I know. I've never seen deleting old/out of date content put behind a paywall. Weird.

Could people stop emailing me for a day or two, so I can get back on top of my inbox?* * Of course I should probably stop emailing people first, so this is largely my fault.

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I have 3 old polls which will now take 3 months from me to remove (if I remember), essentially blocking me from using the service for 3 months :(

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Andy Budd @andybudd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So the new Doodle product is super frustrating. They only let you have one live poll at any one time on the free account now, which is totally cool. But they also only allow you to delete one poll every 30 days.

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I saw somebody comment that they had the chemistry of a divorced couple at their sons wedding.

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Not sketchy but not pleasant either.

I mean my first few visits to London were basically to Leicester Sq, so I thought London was a bit of a dump as well :) And don't get me started on Time Square in NYC.

If they end up doing a cold war reboot of James Bond, this could be the new Q branch gadget.

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Pretty sure I went there as well :)

Think I may have also walked from Union Sq, down Market St past Civic Centre, then past the Armoury down to 16th St Mission, and given up after that.

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Andy Budd @andybudd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

First time I visited SF I stayed on Market, which was then full of adult cinemas, took the subway to 16th St Mission, walked to 24th St, missing Valencia entirely, visited Fishermans Wharf, and came away thinking SF was a dump.

120

I'd say go to a osteo but I realise they're probably like £600 an hour with health insurance in the US, while they're only like £60 here.

Andy Budd @andybudd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It’s basically a fascistic version of passport to pimlico

Andy Budd @andybudd.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I thought it was a really fun movie and so much better than the more recent reboots/extensions.