I finally got to reading Paul Ford’s opinion piece in the New York Times, The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun. I’ve long nodded my head to Paul’s essays, and this wasn’t an exception.
Especially this part near the end, which gels with my (naive?) hopes about AI reducing the amount of software suckiness in people’s lives:
I collect stories of software woe. I think of the friend at an immigration nonprofit who needs to click countless times, in mounting frustration, to generate critical reports. Or the small-business owners trying to operate everything with email and losing orders as a result. Or my doctor, whose time with patients is eaten up by having to tap furiously into the hospital’s electronic health record system.
After decades of stories like those, I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.
My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves.
I hope we can, though what that means for the professional programmer, I don’t know. Clearly there’s a lot of software where “probably right” isn’t good enough, perhaps that is where we will re-find our niche.