Almighty Bakers

Do you own a bread machine? You know, one of those things that you pour flour and water into and out comes a steaming hot loaf of crackly-soft bread? I do. I'm just powered up the bread machine right now. But I haven't turned it on in a while, maybe a month or two. How about you? When was the last time you used your bread machine?

Bread machines are a modern marvel. Literally anybody with this petite device can have freshly baked bread ready in just a few hours with almost no work at all.

But baking a loaf of bread wasn't always so easy. It was hard--really hard if you were trying to make a living as a baker. In fact, baking was deadly.

One of the most deadly jobs in Victorian era London was the job of baker.

The bakers of London had an important job: providing fresh bread for the early morning breakfast crowd every single morning. While at the time industrialization was already affecting other industries, it had yet to come to baking. Bakers needed to begin preparing bread early in the morning so that it would be ready for breakfast. Waking up at 3AM in the basement "kitchen" owned by the guy who bought the building and converted it for use as a bakery, bakers would get to work beating the hell out of the dough. Groups of sweaty men would punch and stomp (yes, with their feet) on the dough for hours everyday from early morning until evening--with little time to rest--in their hot kitchen-dungeon. It really was back breaking labor.

And why exactly? If you've ever made bread yourself, you'll know that kneeding dough can be arduous, but it doesn't feel like slave labor. Why did these strong young men have to work so hard? Because flour at the time was mixed with all kinds of non-flour fillers to save money and make the flour whiter, but they also disrupted the process of the dough turning firm and elastic--preventing the dough from rising as a result. Thus the bakers had to work extra hard and extra long kneeding and pour their sweat into the dough to counteract the negative effects of their very poor quality ingredients.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Bakers were commonly inflicted with the condition called Baker's Lung. What the H is Baker's Lung you ask?

Your fancy bread machine or kitchen oven is powered by electricity. Bakers didn't have electricity. Can you guess what they had? You guessed it: Coal. Not the charcoal you use to barbecue a nice boneless chicken thigh or a hamburger, coal, as in the stuff that is burned by modern power plants to power entire cities. The same coal that children used to dig out of mines. The ovens in the baker's kitchen-dungeon were filled with coal. Bakers had to scrape a layer of coal off the bottom of their freshly baked rolls before packing them up and setting off to deliver the bread to customers themselves.

Given the rather unpleasant nature of their work, you might think they would be overjoyed to have a machine to do the hardest part of their job for them--kneeding the dough--but you would be wrong.

When machines for mixing and kneeding the dough were introduced, the primary concern that bakers had was: What about our careers? You see, being a baker had been one of only a couple dozen lifetime career paths available from ancient times. Sure, the decline of agricultural life and the rise of city-living had 4x'd their traditional workload, it's true, but at least it was good-paying work (it was not). Sure, they worked more than 100 hours a week, but at least they were assured a bright future as the baker foreman one day (they were not). If the machines could do all the kneeding--the most time-consuming and labor-intensive part of the job--what the H was going to happen to their futures as bakers?

That was, of course, not an entirely unfounded fear. After all, the machines were large and expensive, meaning only rich capital owners would even have a chance at benefiting from them. Was there even a future for bakers if they weren't making bread in a factory with heavy equipment automation?

You could be forgiven for not being as concerned about the future of bread making as the Victorian era bakers were. We live in the future they feared: Men aren't paid slave wages to kneed and bake loaves or rolls of white bread in toxic urban bread mines.

Instead, Japanese high school girls work part-time baking dozens of varieties of different luxurious breads, pastries, and other baked delights invented since the Victorian era. They do so in full view of their customers, in a clean, delicious, heavenly environment using dozens of different hand and power tools assisting them. Some may even go on to become Almighty Bakers who own their own business baking high-quality, luxury breads that customers line up outside the building to buy. Sure, here in rural Japan the competition in the baking business is fierce--not only do all the supermarkets and convenience stores sell literally dozens of different baked goods, but there are also specialty chain bakeries and even fellow small-business owners pumping out carbohydrate rich bubbles of the Gods. But the customers have tons of money and a taste for all foods massaged, inflated, and packed with sugars and fats. If you can market your bakery well, you can make a living at it.

And of course, if you want freshly baked bread without doing any work or even leaving your house, you can buy a cheap bread machine and bake bread literally in your sleep.

Software engineers are worried that all the engineering involved with building software is going to be replaced by LLMs doing all the work. Some are worried that LLMs replacing human coders will result in poor code, others are worried the code will be too good. In any case, what are software engineers going to do now? Is software engineering no longer going to be a viable career path? What do we do with all these programmers who won't be programming anymore? Do we just stop teaching the fundamentals and work at a higher level of abstraction? Or do we resist the Genie's Temptation and continue hand-coding to maintain and grow our skills while the frontier labs rug-pull everybody else with higher prices and fewer tokens?

Obviously, bread baking and software development are different things, but if we observe what happened to baking, we'll notice that there are way more bakers around the world than perhaps at any time in history. People love those carbohydrate-rich morsels. On the other hand, people aren't so much in love with software--it's more of an abusive relationship.

Baking is still around, but it has changed significantly. It's easier, safer, and the variety of baked goods is incredible. Yes, the people with the factories pumping out hot steamy loaves are the ones making the most money, but you can make a very fine living simply making cakes. Cakes! If you have niche artistic skills coupled with baking ability you have the potential of making a living.

On the other hand, if you make baking a living, it's probably less about baking and more about running a business--paperwork, taxes, hiring and firing, marketing, sales, adapting to trends, responding to new government regulations, market research, etc. similar to running a restaurant or a photography studio.

Will software engineering follow this trend? Will the model producers be the big winners sitting on piles of money because they have a near-monopoly on a tool software developers are forced to use, while software developers are relegated to becoming meat-proxies for different models and harnesses? Or will the skill of software engineering adapt in a different way from baking--with software engineering itself requiring a different set of skills, but still a viable career unto itself, rather than one skill of many necessary to make a living? Can the autists and anti-social nerds stay in their cubicles or work from home, or do they have to put on a suit and tie and level up from Software Engineer to Small Business Owner?

My prediction is that there will be a messy, relatively quick transition to a more complex market of software builders and users. Just as with all other industries like baking, there will be some people that stick to the Old Ways, others who Keep Up With The Times, and a new generation of builders that grow up in the new world who find new ways to combine Machine Intelligence with their unique interests and skills. Some people will be paid highly for their specialized, Old Fashioned coding skills; some will be paid to be ambitious and good with model prompting to produce good code; others will become generalists and use their unique skill stack and interest stack to produce creative and interesting products and experiences we can't even imagine right now; and still others will enter entirely new markets or industries that didn't exist prior to LLMs. In short, I think there are many opportunities for software engineers of varying capabilities to make their way in this new world.

And, of course, I believe Almighty Common Lisp will be a powerful tool in this new world.

I think it's important to learn a lesson from the Victorian era bakers: We need to be more open to possibilities, and more optimistic about our future. It won't be easy, but I believe that we will look back at our time as software engineers the same way we look back on the bakers who, without quality ingredients, machines, or safe working conditions baking the same limited kinds of bread for 100 hours a week, worried that machines were going to steal their jobs instead of liberate them from their slavish, inhumane conditions. Instead of being paralyzed by fear of the future, they could have been plotting their rise as Almighty Bakers.