"Utter Bullshit": Grady Booch on the Death of Software Engineering


This interview features Grady Booch, a pioneer of software engineering (co-creator of UML and object-oriented design), discussing why AI is not the "end" of the profession, but rather the catalyst for its Third Golden Age.

The Three Golden Ages

The First Golden Age (Late 1940s – Late 1970s):

Focus: Algorithmic abstraction and decoupling software from hardware.

Drivers: The Cold War and military funding (e.g., SAGE missile defense) pushed the need for real-time, distributed systems.

Abstraction: Moving from machine-level "plugboards" to assembly and early high-level languages like Fortran and COBOL [08:52].

The Second Golden Age (Late 1970s – Early 2000s):

Focus: Object-oriented programming and design.

Drivers: The "Software Crisis"—the industry couldn't produce quality code fast enough to meet demand. This era saw the rise of the PC, open source, and the internet.

Abstraction: Moving from processes/functions to objects and classes (e.g., C++, Smalltalk, Java) [24:52].

The Third Golden Age (2000s – Present):

Focus: Rising levels of abstraction via libraries, platforms (SaaS), and AI agents.

AI's Role: Booch views AI as just another "compiler" or level of abstraction. It automates the "tedium" of coding, much like high-level languages replaced assembly [54:36].

The "Need to Hear" Truths

- Coding is NOT Software Engineering: Coding is merely a mechanism. Engineering is the act of balancing technical, economic, and ethical forces. AI can generate code, but it cannot yet navigate the human and social complexities of a system.

- Critique of AI Doomism: Booch explicitly refutes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s claim that software engineering will be automated in 12 months, calling it "utter bullshit" [59:37]. He argues AI is trained on recurring patterns, but "there are more things in computing than are dreamt of in your philosophy" [01:01:40].

- The Survival Strategy: To thrive, developers must "move up the abstraction ladder." Stop worrying about raw lines of code and start mastering Systems Theory and managing complexity at scale.

Memorable Sound Bites

- "The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction."


- "Ideally, the largest team size you want for software is zero... the next best one is one."

- Vibe & verify.


- "The best technology evaporates and disappears and becomes part of the air that we breathe."


- "In terms of how I would characterize what Dario said... it's utter bullshit."


- "English is a good enough programming language... it just so happens it's imprecise and expressive."


- "There is nothing new under the sun... those fundamentals in engineering, they're still there."


- "This is the time to leap and I'm going to soar... this is the time to soar."

Fun Facts

- the very term software engineering did not come to be until Margaret Hamilton was probably the first to anoint it.



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