The past and future of software development (ChatGPT)

 Seven Ages of Code — and the Next Act

The history of programming is less a straight line than a series of tectonic jolts. Move the cursor back to 1945 and you find pioneers standing ankle‑deep in solder and paper tape; fast‑forward to 2025 and an LLM is finishing your functions before you’ve hit the semicolon. Here, then, is a whistle‑stop tour through the shifts that truly rewired the craft, followed by a glimpse of the near horizon.

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1. Valve‑Age Hand‑Coding (1945‑1956)

The beginning was literal wiring. Programs were patch‑cords and relay banks, bugs were singed fingers, and “debugging” meant a screwdriver, not a pull request. Code, insofar as it existed, was written in octal and punched into tape that stretched like an endless rosary of regret.

2. Compiler Dawn (1957‑1969)

John Backus's FORTRAN and Grace Hopper's COBOL pried open abstraction’s door: algorithms could now be written rather than etched in metal or listed in arcane symbology. Portability entered the lexicon, and the idea of the same program running on two different machines felt almost deliciously heretical.

3. Structured Republic (1970‑1984)

Enter Pascal, C, and the polemic against goto. Unix spread across academia like an amiable virus, interactive editors replaced card decks, and the terminal became a second home. Programs at last resembled prose—albeit prose punctured by semicolons.

4. Object & GUI Renaissance (1985‑1994)

Smalltalk‑80, C++, and the graphical interface shifted focus from procedures to things. The mouse scurried across the desk; windows overlapped like office gossip. Codebases now modelled business domains—and occasionally the programmer’s own ego.

5. Internet / Open‑Source Insurgency (1995‑2004)

The web blew the walls off the lab. “View Source” was the new textbook, Agile the new catechism. LAMP, Python, and CVS → Subversion (version control systems) armed a million hobbyists. Release cycles shrank from calendar years to coffee breaks.

6. Git & Cloud Frontier (2005‑2014)

Linus Torvalds gifted Git; Amazon rented out the data‑centre aisle by the hour. GitHub turned version control into a social network and Continuous Integration into a reflex. Software escaped the rack and found sanctuary in the ether.

7. Container‑Native Era (2015‑2021)

Docker boxed applications like so much takeaway, Kubernetes orchestrated fleets of them, and “Infrastructure as Code” became the mantra. YAML files bred like rabbits; post‑mortems became the weekly book club.

8. The Copilot Moment (2022‑2024)

Large‑language models—GPT‑4 and its cohort—took the boilerplate bullet. Surveys show 70‑plus percent of developers now lean on AI to draft, refactor, and test. The keyboard has acquired a ghost, and that ghost is chatty.

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What Happens Next (2025‑2030)

Autonomous Spec‑to‑Deploy Pipelines
Declare intent; an orchestral suite of agents designs, codes, provisions, and tests. Humans sign off where risk or regulation demands a pulse.

Verification by Default
Formal methods, once the province of spacecraft, return to Earth. If an LLM can discharge SAT‑solver proofs faster than you write unit tests, you’ll let it. Bring it on!

Domain‑Trained Copilots
Generic models give way to boutique brains: fintech copilots fluent in COBOL derivatives; gaming copilots that dream in shaders; parish‑finance copilots versed in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).

Self‑Maintaining Repos
Your codebase files its own pull requests—shifting libraries before the CVE lands, migrating APIs, perhaps even refactoring from monolith to micro‑kernel while you sleep.

And the caveat: expertise concentrates. Junior “code monkeys” thin out; senior developers become stewards—curators of prompts, arbiters of diff, translators between automated suggestion and organisational conscience. Less Tolstoy, more conductor with a baton made of regex...