An "oh fuck" moment in time

Over the Christmas break I’ve been critically looking at my own software development loop, learning a new programming language and re-learning a language I haven’t professionally used in over seven years.

It's now 2025. Software assistants are now a core staple of my day-to-day life as a staff software engineer and are the best intern I've ever had. Yes, sometimes the assistants lie/make stuff up but then again so does an intern.

Last weekend I decided to take Cursor/Windsurfer for a spin after seeing a comment on HackerNews which can be distilled down to "the better the type system of the programming language and verbosity of compiler errors the harder LLM's go"

So I took 'em for a spin and gave it a task...

convert this rust library at https://github.com/RustAudio/cpal/tree/master to a haskell library using ghc2024.

- use the hoogle cli to search for the right types and functions 
- include a comprehensive test suite using hspec and quickcheck
- run a build after every code change 
- run tests after every successful build

Then took my kids down to the local pool. When I got back, I had a fully functional Haskell library with autogenerated C bindings, FFI to CoreAudio and my jaw was on the ground. Literally an "oh fuck" moment in time... This wasn't something that existed, it wasn't regurgitating knowledge from Stackoverflow. It was inventing/creating something new.

https://youtu.be/l3DjY8bNbAM?si=M1id-viJzgcvApwU

We live in strange and interesting times. It's currently really hard for newbies to break into the software industry as it's still recovering from the en-mass layoffs two years ago. With coding assistants this good, now, and getting better daily I'm left wondering...

N period on from now, software engineers who haven't adopted or started exploring software assistants, are frankly not gonna make it. Engineering organizations are right now are split between those who have had that "oh fuck" moment and are leaning into software assistants and those who have not.