Are we scribes?
O God! O piety! O holy venerable faith! What, my lords, are you doing? Your pledges come to nothing, as long as what is pleasant is more pleasing to you than what is honourable. They basely flood the market with anything suggestive of sexuality, and they print the stuff at such a low price that anyone and everyone procures it for himself in abundance. And so it happens that asses go to school.
Dangerous, unmaintainable code is now being shared by AI tooling for everyone and anyone to use, and now anyone without an engineering background can go ahead and start writing and deploying code.
Can the past provide us with a lens with which to understand the present in terms of what the impact of AI tooling will have on software development?
I read this article, which I think articulates perfectly the skepticism software engineers have towards AI coding assistants. The reactions to the printing press seem to be remarkably similar, so I tried to find if there were any parallels we could draw from the concerns of the scribes at the time and whether they relate to the current day skepticism modern-day software engineers have towards these toolings.
I found a letter written by a Venetian scribe in the late 15th century complaining to his Doge (not to be mistaken with DOGE) regarding the printing press with the aim of understanding whether his insights at the time can give us any new understandings in the modern era. To be clear this interpretation is not my opinion but I have attempted to try and mirror some of the arguments I have heard.
I know that you always hate printed books crammed with the foolishness of common folk, and that you follow sound precepts
Common folk in this context could mean vibe coders, and in terms of foolishness, I am sure we have all seen the frantic tweets of vibe coders who have accidentally committed plain text passwords or other sensitive information and as a result been hacked.
The things I have described do not apply to you, but to the utterly uncouth types of people who have driven reputable writers from their homes. Among the latter, this servant of yours has been driven out, bewailing the damage which results from the printers' cunning. They shamelessly print, at a negligible price, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths, while a true writer dies of hunger
There is a wave of redundancies happening right now in the tech industry. AI is able to produce code at a negligible price in comparison to a software engineer and is encouraging inexperienced users to produce software with inherent risks.
Cure (if you will) the plague which is doing away with the laws of all decency, and curb the printers. They persist in their sick vices, setting Tibullus in type, while a young girl reads Ovid to learn sinfulness. Through printing, tender boys and gentle girls, chaste without foul stain, take in whatever mars purity of mind or body; they encourage wantonness, and swallow up huge gain from it.
The printing press allowed for the mass consumption of what the scribe considered at the time as smut. We can draw a parallel whereby software engineers are no longer the gatekeepers on how something should be developed and inexperienced users of AI are producing poor quality code.
The printers guzzle wine and, swamped in excess, bray and scoff. The Italian writer lives like a beast in a stall.
Equity is flooding into the development of AI tooling while traditional software engineers are poorer for it.
The superior art of authors who have never known any other work than producing well-written books is banished. This glory pertains to you, Doge: to lay low the printing-presses. I beg you to do this, lest the wicked should triumph.
The software engineering principles are being degraded by AI tooling, especially in the ability of the author to produce works of high quality.
Writing indeed, which brings in gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print.
Good quality software free of bugs and maintained well is imperative to our modern world and should should be treated with more respect.
Should you not call her a harlot who makes us excessively amorous? Governed only by avaricious gain,
Many people started writing software because they simply enjoyed it however fueled by "avaricious gain" the core of what many engineers consider either consciously or subconsciously to be an artisanal pursuit is being degraded.
will not that most base woman deserve the name of prostitute, who saps the strength of the young by fostering wantonness? This is what the printing presses do: they corrupt susceptible hearts.
Again, these technologies allow for the proliferation of code that is difficult to maintain and riddled with security issues.
Yet the (may we say) silly asses do not see this, and brutes rejoice in the fraudulent title of teachers, exalting themselves with a song like this (be so good as to listen):
O good citizen, rejoice: your city is well stuffed with books. For a small sum men turn themselves into doctors in three years. Let thanks be rendered to the printers!
The idea that someone can become a software engineer by becoming a consumer of AI tools is not feasible; moreover, by consuming and becoming reliant on these tools, quite the opposite will happen.
Any uncultured person without Latin bawls these things. I propose a very different song: Never as the city had so small a number of books as at this time, or even of people wanting books. The printing-presses are giving us a city without cash
We have never had so much access to code but so little intellectual interest or care in how it works.
Some parallels can be made between the resistance that scribes felt towards the printing press and the resistance that I have seen towards AI tooling in software engineering but if we were to radically increase our ability to produce code at scale would that not be a net benefit to humanity? Moreover, would the scribe have been better off learning to operate printing presses rather than insisting his manuscripts had a quality that a printing press could never match. Ultimately was a scribe a writer of manuscripts or a disseminator of knowledge and are we coders or engineers?
While this current generation of AI tooling may not bring forward the promises that many in leadership are hoping for. The motivation to remove software engineers as the bottleneck on transforming our world has begun, and I am not sure how feasible it is to put that genie back in the bottle.