Software Is Changing (Again)
Andrej Karpathy recently gave a keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco and he called it “Software Is Changing (Again)”. He laid down the current state of AI/LLM assisted programming, and where it is going.
Software development has evolved in these steps:
- Software 1.0: code written by humans (started mid of last century)
- Software 2.0: programming neural nets with weights (started a couple of decades ago?)
- Software 3.0: programming LLMs with prompts (started a couple of years ago)
Karpathy advises anybody who is entering the field now to be good at all of the above. A good reminder for newcomers that 1.0 cannot be skipped in spite of the current hype about AI which will make you believe that learning to code is no longer necessary.
One other interesting tidbit is a new convention of adding llms.txt along side your web documentation of whatever web services your company offers, in order to enable coding agents. For example, Stripe documentation has an llms.txt at https://docs.stripe.com/llms.txt
The keynote is worth watching.