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Home/Magazine Archive/July 2023 (Vol. 66, No. 7)/July 2023 (Vol. 66, No. 7)/Abstract

Letters to the Editor

The End Is Not Clear

By CACM Staff
Communications of the ACM, July 2023, Vol. 66 No. 7, Page 9
10.1145/3596710
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Letters to the Editor — Credit: Getty Images

In his January 2023 Communications Viewpoint, "The End of Programming," Matt Welsh wrote "nobody actually understands how large AI models work." However, already no one person understands existing large computer systems. Indeed, no team of people understands them. Staff turnover and other practicalities of real life mean not even the team that wrote them originally (should it still exist) nor the team currently responsible for maintaining them, fully understands large software systems, which can now exceed a billion lines of code. And yet such systems are in worldwide daily use and deliver economic benefits.

W.B. Langdon, London, U.K.

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