At this point, AI writing code is inevitable. People I know are, understandably, worried about the impacts on our vocation. I don’t profess to be prescient about the upcoming effects, but I have a different take.
I’m hopeful that one possible consequence of pervasive AI generated code is that there is much more software functionality to go around. It may sometimes feel like we have a lot of software around us, but if examined closely, its effects are unequally distributed. As an example, ad-serving platforms (financially lucrative but debatably socially positive) have humongous and robust stacks while restaurant websites (personally positive) are positively impoverished.
Software is hard to build right. It is, at its best, a delicate dance done right between requirements, design, architecting, writing good code, and giving a damn. As a result, people gravitate towards building things once and building it right. Which is why people want to be opinionated, build frameworks to incorporate best practices, and the resulting power law distribution of adoption and resources.
AI writing code can change all that. If code can be written quickly with sufficient quality, and more importantly, cheaply, then code doesn’t have to always conform to the most common denominator (or popular opinion). The consequences of lowering this bar will be immense. Small businesses can break free from the big platform or janky home grown dichotomy. Software that conforms to natural workflows instead of vice versa (goodbye to enterprise software contracts). People can rewrite user interfaces to suit their abilities, needs, and preferences.
I am most curious to the last one. Because of the cost of building software, design has always have a citadel like quality to it. We profess to be the whisperer of what our users need and direct the provision of them in software modules. What if users no longer need this layer of translation? I don’t think this will lead to better designed software; it may instead lead to generally terrible software, except that in this world every jagged rock is someone else’s gem. We may truly enter the era of personalized software. To push it into the logical conclusion, seams and structures of software today will cease to exist and instead we will have access to capabilities on our terms, on demand.
It is a challenging framing to consider even beyond considering the existential threat to our livelihoods. For me, abundance upsets so much of what we take for granted, rituals and expectations that are built up over decades of the computing industry. But that may all be for the greater good. Or not. Interesting times indeed.