Post-Its
When software becomes as cheap and disposable as a Post-It note, we'll use it for things we haven't even imagined yet.
Yesterday’s NYT daily podcast with Clive Thompson was a delight (and nicely summarized many of the things he covered in his full length op-ed last month). The impact of AI on professional software engineering is profound; everybody agrees that a lot more code will get written, a lot faster. But beyond that, nobody knows how it’ll all play out, or what the implications are for the career and discipline of software engineering.
Over here in not-a-professional-engineer space, though, things are decidedly more cheery. When AI can take your idea from a description to working code, it opens up vast new possibilities for people who—realistically—would never have developed the skills to do modern software development. The fact that you no longer need to wade through the abject complexity means regular people can actually make useful, fun software now. Rad.
This means the ideas you’ve had floating around in your head for years can suddenly come to life. That perfect to-do list; the website for sharing your snarky burrito reviews; the app to mediate fights between your kids; whatever you’ve been dreaming of.
But there’s something more. Some of the most amazing things you’ll do with this new ability are ideas that you haven’t even been able to have yet.
This is something that really stuck out to me in the interview:
What’s going to happen is that software stops being something that is precious and rare. It reminds me maybe a little bit of what happened with, like—this is going to sound really weird, but—with paper. So, paper used to be incredibly rare. You go back to pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania, and the average person had access to four pieces of paper a year.
And then suddenly, it becomes a lot cheaper, and all over the place, and you’ve got weird things like Post-It Notes, which are these really weird forms of paper that just transform the way that you live your life ...
So I think something very weird is going to happen as software stops being something that is special and difficult, and becomes almost like a Post-It Note, where it is ubiquitous; we call it into being for short-term reasons; it changes aspects of the way we communicate, and the way we deal with other people, in ways that I can’t really predict. But I do think that is what we’re looking at.
When paper is expensive and hard to come by, the notion that you would use it in this disposable way—like, so you don’t forget to pack your kid’s lunch—seems ludicrous.
When software is expensive and hard to come by, it’s the same thing. What kinds of new uses haven’t even crossed your mind yet?
This is one of the core benefits of getting in to the practice of making software right now; not just that it lets you work through your backlog of ideas (which it does!), but that it might open your mind to ideas you haven’t even had yet (nor has anyone else).
As a (very) minor example of this, I’m working on launching a new podcast (stay tuned, launching next week!). I narrowed it down to a few choices of opening music, but wanted a second opinion (especially given that my taste in music runs a bit eclectic). Normally, I would’ve just asked a couple friends for their opinion, but knowing how easy it is to make software, I thought to myself, “Why not make a little poll where a bunch of people can rank the options, and I get the one that’s most popular in aggregate?” So I did! And I got much better feedback. It’s here if you want to take it yourself:
conjuringcode.com/podcast/intro-poll
(I’ll have to decide on the actual music within the next day or two, but I’ll leave it open for a while as an example at least.)
It’s not like this is a particularly novel approach, nor is it something that would’ve been all that hard to make before. But before, the difficulty of actually doing it would probably have prevented me from even seriously entertaining the idea.
As you become better at making the software that comes into your mind, what new kinds of things are going to occur to you?