Musk is, true to form, going above and beyond when it comes to blinkered incompetence; but this sordid performance reminds me of a more general trend that seems likely to lead to some really messy stories in the future.
The vendors of various low code/no code/AI-driven/‘visual’/etc. tools are all very rosy on the glorious future where we’ll get software just by describing what we want (and, in fairness, there has been some progress in the area); but what never gets discussed is that you still need to know what you want in order to describe it.
Today it’s easy to delude yourself about how well you understand what you want because programming is a nontrivial specialist exercise that requires a lot of fiddly syntactic knowledge, familiarity with libraries, etc. If someone did cook up an indistinguishable-from-magic “you tell me what you want and I generate software” AI you’d suddenly have a lot of people who can no longer believe that their inability to produce software is down to unfamiliarity with C syntax; but stems from their lack of conceptual clarity.
In this case, we don’t even need to postulate such a system because programmers are basically strong AIs that turn requirements into software, if you know how to talk to them; and oh man does Musk not know how to talk to them.
