Code is cheap. Show me the talk

Summary

TLDR; Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over. LLM coding tools have changed it fundamentally for the better or worse. “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” — Linus Torvalds, August 2000 When Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, made this quip in response to a claim about a complex piece of programming in the Linux kernel, [1] I was an oblivious, gangly, fledgling teenage n00b coder learning by copy-pasting open source Perl and VB snippets over dialup internet. The quip has since become an adage in the software world. The gist of it back then was that, it was easy to talk about all the software stuff one would like to do, or could be hypothetically done, but unless one actually put in the effort and proved it, talk wasn’t of much value. Writing and proving good software was a high-effort, high-cost, high-skill endeavour. Even when armed with a crystal clear software development plan and the exact know-how to implement it, any sufficiently complex piece of programming is high-effort, tedious, and time consuming to actually write and get to a form where it is functional, reliable, and at least reasonably future-ready. In the process of developing software, any number of unforeseen complexities and gotchas can arise with many unresolvable trade-offs,[2] both technical and external. It is not uncommon for software architectures to change mid-way multiple times. The cost of just trying things out is so exponentially high that the significant majority of ideas are simply never tried out. After all, the real bottleneck is good old physical and biological human constraints—cognitive bandwidth, personal time and resources, and most importantly, the biological cost and constraints of having to sit for indefinite periods, writing code with one’s own hands line by line even if it is all in one’s head, while juggling and context-switching through the mental map of large systems. And if it is more than one individual, a whole host of interpersonal coordinatio...