The Death of Classical Computer Science • Matt Welsh & Julian Wood • GOTO 2025

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. #GOTOcon #GOTOunscripted
https://gotopia.tech

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/398

Matt Welsh - Head of Al Systems at Palantir
Julian Wood - Serverless Developer Advocate at AWS @julian_wood

RESOURCES
Matt
  / mdwelsh  
https://www.mdw.la
https://github.com/mdwelsh
  / welsh-matt  
https://www.ultravox.ai

Julian
https://bsky.app/profile/julianwood.com
  / julian_wood  
http://www.wooditwork.com
  / julianrwood  

Links
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DESCRIPTION
Matt Welsh, former professor at Harvard University and AI researcher, argues to Julian Wood that we're witnessing the death of classical computer science as language models evolve into general-purpose computers capable of direct problem-solving without human-written code.

He envisions a future where AI eliminates programming barriers, democratizing computing power so anyone can instruct computers through natural language. While acknowledging concerns about job displacement and societal equity, Matt believes this transformation will unleash unprecedented human creativity by putting the full power of computing in everyone's hands, moving beyond the current "programming priesthood" to universal access to computational problem-solving.

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
00:24 LLMs as the new computers
06:07 The future of language models: From silos to integration
11:15 Open Source models & the democratization of AI
17:44 From programming priesthood to universal computing
29:31 Challenges & concerns
44:53 Outro

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Michael Feathers • AI Assisted Programming • https://leanpub.com/ai-assisted-progr...
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer & Matt Welsh • Running Linux • https://amzn.to/3YSwAIv
Alex Castrounis • AI for People and Business • https://amzn.to/3NYKKTo
Phil Winder • Reinforcement Learning • https://amzn.to/3t1S1VZ
Kelleher & Tierney • Data Science (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) • https://amzn.to/3AQmIRg

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