A lot of current tech discourse brings up a mix of dread, irritation, and euphoric delight, and I’ve been sitting with it for a while. The same forces that hollow out labour and strain ecosystems also lower the cost of building small, practical software for everyday problems.
It’s difficult to quote just one part of this essay, but seasoned writer and co-founder of Aboard, Paul Ford, captures that fun and frightening mood better than I could. He speaks to this moment in a way that acknowledges the doom of a clearly unfair and gamified economy, the gloom from the lack of accountability, leadership, and governance, and the elephant in the room: how all of this can be fun and terrifying for people who like to use technology. I can’t forget the broom for dealing with what the elephant leaves behind in the environment. Anyway, here’s a better look:
The tech industry is a global culture—an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?
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.
There are many arguments against vibe coding through A.I. It is an ecological disaster, with data centers consuming billions of gallons of water for cooling each year; it can generate bad, insecure code; it creates cookie-cutter apps instead of real, thoughtful solutions; the real value is in people, not software. All of these are true and valid. But I've been around too long. The web wasn't "real" software until it was. Blogging wasn't publishing. Big, serious companies weren't going to migrate to the cloud, and then one day they did.
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
Here is why: 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.
Excerpts from a guest essay by Paul Ford: The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived | The New York Times.