The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (opens in new tab)

Until I became a software engineer at 32, my whole professional life was organized around the written word. I was a historian, one who was firmly anchored in books and archives and articles. I switched careers for reasons that aren’t important here and that I’ve ; suffice it to say, the job market for historians was sufficiently terrible that I wanted to do something else. I became a software engineer because I liked the problem-solving and design aspects of it. I work as a backend engineer f...