What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof? That doesn’t mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly.
And for lots of users, that’s going to be fine. People don’t judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They’re not looking for the human connection of art. They’re looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work.
Up to this point, writing software has been an arcane craft practiced by highly specialized artisans. Very few people can do it, and even fewer people can do it well. […]
Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person owned only a few pairs of clothes, and many people spent the majority of their lives making those clothes by hand. Today, very few people actually make clothes but there are thousands of apparel companies for every type of activity – from skiing to nursing to firefighting – that would have been unimaginable before. Similarly, the Software Industrial Revolution will lead to an explosion of new bespoke software across every industry and niche, and the fact that we’ll no longer build the software by hand means that we’ll build and use much more of it.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.
There are a thousand factors at play here (most of which are still in motion) but for plenty of small-scale, snap-together projects, something like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex will be good enough, for economically-viable values of both “good” and “enough.” They’ll either burp up scripts that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise, or do (some of) the work of (some) junior or mid-level coders (somewhat) faster and cheaper. But the direction things are headed seems pretty clear.
Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.
Tom Blomfield (Monzo’s founder):
I think we’re going to have a lot more software in the future. Normal, non-technical people will be able to summon up a new custom-written software program to solve a trivial daily task much the same way they might use a spreadsheet to make a list or do simple sums today.
Here’s the problem. That increased demand will be met with increased supply – from rapidly scaling AI. I just don’t think there will be any point in a human writing code for very much longer. My guess is that AI will soon be provably and obviously better at basically every facet of it. We will still have senior software engineers supervising the AI for many years because it makes humans feel safer. But they will eventually be like the conductors on self-driving trams; they are mainly there to make people feel better. This is the point that makes software engineers really angry, I think.
There will be more software than ever before. This is not just because of AI coding or agents building products or whatever. It is because we are nowhere near meeting the demand for what software can do. This holds for software I use on my own, software a business needs, software an organization needs, or software to control the explosion of devices that replace every analog device with an automated one.