This topic is very relevant in the age of agentic AI when every decision is a statistical next token prediction “trained” on some loss function. AGENT.md, SOUL.md etc are just smoke and mirrors of The Wizard of the Oz.
Eventually manager as a profession will be replaced by tools, just like computer as a profession, editor as a profession.
The evolution of computer science will be manager science. There is more than loss function and KPI.
Are technical/scientific books from pre-1925 particularly useful for self-learning today? I'd imagine for most disciplines, the knowledge has progressed and possibly changed course since then and it may be more outdated than not.
It might depend on the topic. Classical mechanics? I'm not sure that there is any fundamentally new knowledge since 1925 in that field. What's different is that people have 100 more years of figuring out how to explain it well.
I think there are two use cases of open source, one is for people who need a solution to grab and use. In this case, I think LLM Agents will pick up quickly and replace grab and use type of engineering.
The second use case is for HUMAN to learn from human. Your open source projects are excellent examples, same with Django and Python open source ecosystem.
I just hope humans will not stop learning. As long as you share your passion of learning, people will learn from you. It has nothing to do automation.
There is a third type: rabbit. This is a golden age of rabbit holes. A quick rabbit jumps through complicated holes and tunnels to escape from something or chase something.
We can also call someone chasing a rabbit a fox. Like all the ones chasing LLM agents now.
To some extent. Many mathematical breakthroughs are not from mathematicians thinking in the office but mathematical minded people doing engineering work and bumped into big ideas. Mandelbrot was one of them, so was Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Tony Hoare, …
They are engineers by trade, that is chasing the money as food. But money is not enough for them. So I would call them rabbits instead of foxes.
If you read that Wirth 1995 paper (A Plea for Lean Software) referenced by the OP, following paragraphs answered your question:
“
To some, complexity equals power
A system’s ease of use always should be a primary goal, but that ease should be based on an underlying concept that makes the use almost intuitive. Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user. (What it does confer is a feeling of helplessness, if not impotence.) Therefore, the lure of complexity as sale incentive is easily understood; complexity promotes customer dependence on the vendor.”
I am typing (no screenshots or copy and paste) this 30 year old wisdom in to reply here as an archived reminder for myself.
Eventually manager as a profession will be replaced by tools, just like computer as a profession, editor as a profession.
The evolution of computer science will be manager science. There is more than loss function and KPI.
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