First, AI will do unprofitable programming work

In a recent episode of NeverRewrite, Isaac and I discussed the implications of AI doing rewrites for developers.  

So what if things change?

AI will probably replace most of the coding that developers do day-to-day today.  Today’s developers don’t punch punch cards, don’t design circuits, or write assembly code.  The nature of development has changed in the past, and will change in the future.

The first killer app for the PC was Lotus 1-2-3, which made spreadsheets widely accessible.  People used Lotus to perform a lot of accounting functions, but we still have accounting software.  Spreadsheets didn’t replace special function software, they created a new category of general purpose tools.

Rather than eating software development jobs, AI is a general purpose tool that will enable an explosion of software at the unprofitable low end.

What is The Unprofitable Low End of Software Development?

Simply, software developers are expensive.  There is a lot of potential software that could be written, but wouldn’t be profitable enough to hire someone to write.  There are tons of single use, single purpose tasks that could be replaced with a small bit of code, but only if you happened to have a developer nearby.

No Code / Low Code solutions help narrow the gap, but there are tons of tasks that are still too small to be generalized.

For example, I recently took a 3,500 product catalog in CSV form and wrote some python to upload the products to Shopify.  It also performed a second step to pull in the images from the factory’s website and associated them with the new products.  Shopify has great tools, uploading the file would be easy, but adding the images would have been a daunting and dull manual task.

Easy for a developer though; I ran it once, and will probably never touch the code again.

Trust, When You Can Verify

AI can write mostly correct code today.  When you can verify the results, you can accept them.

In the Shopify example you can verify by checking to see how many products were created.  You can check to see if they have images.  If it showed up on Shopify, then the software is correct.  It is running locally so performance and security pretty much don’t matter.  Optimized string functions and defensive string escaping aren’t concerns when you are only dealing with one file, once.

Prediction: AI Will Increase API Usage

As a development tool, AI will turn the average user into a mediocre API developer.  There will be an explosion of non-technical people using company’s APIs to solve bespoke problems in ways that couldn’t be done profitably before AI.  This won’t reduce the need for developers, it will increase the demand for people who can write APIs that are resilient, performant and secure.

Expect a flood of customers using your API in ways you couldn’t imagine.  The question isn’t how to have AI write code for your company, the question is how to make it easy for AI to use your API.

I can’t wait to see what people come up with!