What is going on right now?

This ends in Idiocracy. The graybeards will phase out, the juniors will become staff level, except.. software will just be "more difficult". No-one really understands how it works, how could they? More importantly WHY should they? The Machine does the code. If The Machine gets it wrong it's not my fault.

The TRUE takeaway here is that as of about 12 months ago, spending time investing in becoming a god-mode dev is not the optimal path for the next phase of whatever we're moving into.

I think that's only true if you assume that the AI bubble will never burst.

Bitcoin didn't replace cash, Blockchain didn't replace databases and NoSQL didn't make SQL obsolete. And while I have been wrong before, I'm optimistic that AI will only replace programmers the same way copy-pasting from StackOverflow replaced programmers back in the day.

I'm afraid we already in the phase where regular devs have no idea how things work under the hood. So many web devs fail on the simple interview question "what happens when user enters a url and presses enter?" I would understand not knowing the details of DNS protocol, but not understanding the basics of what browser/OS/CPU is doing is just unprofessional.

And LLM assisted coding apparently makes this knowledge even less useful.

Met a dev who couldn't understand the difference between git, the program, and github, the remote git frontend.

I explained it a few times. He just couldn't wrap his head around that there were files on his computer and also on a different computer over the internet.

Now, I will admit distributed VCS can be tricky if you've never seen it before. But I'm not kidding - he legitimately did not understand the division of local vs the internet. That was just a concept that he never considered before.

He also didn't know anything about filesystems but that's a different story.

We've already seen the plateau forming[1]. GPT4.X vs GPT5 isn't exactly a revolution. It will become much cheaper, much faster, but not much better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979107

"Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue." (https://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt)

This phase has been going on for decades now. It's a shame, really.

I think this is mostly true, but when it gets cheaper and faster, it will be able to complete much larger tasks unsupervised.

larger != more complex

The widespread adoption of cheap agentic AI will absolutely be an economic revolution. Millions of customer support jobs will be completely eliminated in the next few years, and that's just the beginning.

Soon it'll be easy to give an AI all the same things you give a new employee: an email address, a slack username, a web browser, access to the company intranet, a GitHub account, a virtual machine with mouse and keyboard control, etc. and you'll be able to swap it out one-for-one with pretty much any low-level employee.

> So many web devs fail on the simple interview question "what happens when user enters a url and presses enter?"

Is the answer you're looking for along the lines of "the browser makes a GET request to the specified URL," or something lower-level than that?

This seems like a common theme around very young computer users: Applications and operating systems have, for over a decade, deliberately tried to blur the line between "files on your computer" and "files in the cloud". Photo apps present you a list of photos, and deliberately hide what filesystem those photos are actually on. "They're just your photos. Don't think too much about where they are!" The end result is that the median computer user has no idea that files exist in some physical space and there is a difference between local and remote storage.

My kid struggles with this. She can't intuitively grasp why one app needs the Internet and another app does not. I try to explain it but it all goes over her head. The idea that you need the Internet when your app needs to communicate with something outside of the phone is just foreign to her: In her mind, "the app" just exists, and there's no distinction between stuff on the phone and stuff on the network.

I think it's one of those intentionally vague questions that helps in probing the knowledge depth. Interviewees are typically free to describe the process with as much detail as they can.

I would be looking for a fractal answer and judge on the depth

I don't think I agree with calling that question "simple". I could probably speak non-stop an entire hour before we even leave my local computer: electric impulses, protocol between keyboard and PC, BIOS, interruptions, ASCII and Unicode, OS, cache, types of local storage, CPU, GPU, window management and TCP stack, encryption... It's hard to come up with a computer-related field that's not somehow involved in answering that one question.

If anything, I always consider it a good question to assert whether someone knows when to stop talking.

Yep, it's also a good way to see if candidates "know what they don't know"

Sure, but what does that tell you about the candidate's ability to do the actual job? It just sounds like a meaningless trivia test.