Profession. Isaac Asimov

I first read this novella at school, when I was about fourteen. Yesterday, more than twenty years later, I read it again. And it seems to me that the story has only become more relevant.

We are constantly looking for more efficient ways to do everything. We want better results, faster and at lower cost. And that is a good desire. That is what progress is. Provided we do not lose something important along the way. Unfortunately, we constantly do.

Today, the most obvious example is the use of LLMs in software development. When you can create something looking like a product in a matter of minutes using a vaguely formulated thought expressed in natural language, it makes you feel unstoppable. You begin to feel that you are only one small step away from becoming omnipotent, and that there will no longer be any need for those crowds of useless programmers who waste your time with endless arguments about whether some feature can even be built. Programmers themselves, after trying to "code" with an LLM a few times, are often reluctant to return to "slow, manual development."

Righ now, all of this is a major step forward. Routine tasks can now be solved much faster, and most tasks have always been routine. But the problem is the same one around which the plot of Profession is built. While the masses get quick results and become part of the ecosystem, someone still has to truly understand how things work from the ground up. Because long-term progress cannot be built on template solutions alone.

And this is where those very people who do not fit into the mainstream come to our aid. They refuse to follow "progress." They continue slowly tinkering with things by hand and spend days digging into problems that an LLM could solve in minutes. Yet it is precisely people with this kind of mind who move us forward.

We need to protect our schizoids.