Software Conjuring

Software engineering is becoming a mystic art

Still amazed I have to say this, but this was not written by “AI”. It’s directly off the noggin, all organic, 100% meat-made.

Before the dawn of LLMs, I would often write little bits of software or small apps to make my life easier. Hardly a novel concept, programmers have been doing this for an age. It’s exhilarating to automate the boring or difficult parts of life!

Humans can finally extend their reach, their leverage, their power out past the bounds of space and time!

I built my entire career out of sharing my own methodologies of software engineering. I put code and ideas out into the world for free, other people liked them (many did not), and I landed myself a job where I got to focus a vast majority of my time on my passion projects.

And I can’t shake the feeling that this really is the end of an era. I built a community and a platform along with an open source framework. Through that community, through the world of open source, I can see that critical mass has been reached.

Funnily enough, LLMs are only one part of that equation. A big part, sure, but software has been trending easier since its inception. Small teams have been building wildly impressive software for many years now. To me LLMs just feel like the last chapter of a story that has been winding down for a while. We may still have many years ahead of us...but one way or another...

Software engineering will become software conjuring

In the occult literature, conjuring is somehow both technical and magical. Your pentagram must be drawn just right. Your circle of salt mustn’t be broken. You must say your incantation just so, else you risk the wrath of a paranormal entity. You can’t give a demon too much information about yourself otherwise it will have power over you. Your instructions must be so clear that they cannot possibly be turned back on you by a malignant entity.

Starting to sound familiar?

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I’ve found myself to be quite effective at the use of LLMs to build software, and the latest iterations of Claude and ChatGPT are only enhancing that fact. I am extremely skilled with my own suite of tools that I built for building these kinds of things. Because of that, I can give an LLM very clear instructions about what I want built and how I want it built.

The thing is that it really doesn’t feel like engineering any more. I feel instead that I’ve gotten really good at my spellwork. I’ve studied the ancient lore of “functional programming” and “abstraction”. My language of choice is called Elixir for christ’s sake. I’ve learned to draw very straight lines on my pentacles (the boundaries I give to the LLM). Place this here, place that there. I know where it will try to make naughty choices and how to head it off before the little machine demon can mess something up.

I’m starting to feel like a software conjurer, and honestly I have no idea how I feel about that.