Work On A Copy

Building software is among the best things you can do with AI, because you can always work on a copy.

In software engineering, we have a superpower that many fields lack: we can make perfect copies of the things we build (i.e. our code) any time we want.

So when we change something, we always change a copy rather than changing the real thing (aka “production”) directly. We only push our changes to production when they’re ready (i.e. we’ve tested that nothing is broken).

This isn’t how most professions work, at all. Surgeons don’t get to “make a copy” of your body, and then swap out the copy with the “real” you if the procedure works out. (If they could, the state of the art in medicine would move much faster!)

The closest analog I’ve been able to imagine in other fields is something like a chef making new recipes. Most of the time, line cooks just follow the same recipes night after night. But if you’re a chef and you have an idea for a new dish, you don’t just start randomly feeding it to real customers. You iterate on it by yourself, behind the scenes (during the daytime, or in a test kitchen) where only you (and maybe a couple other chefs) get to judge whether it’s good enough. You tweak, you change, you taste, and only when you’re happy with it do you push copies of that recipe out to the real kitchen and put it on the menu.

This is so important in software, it’s practically second-nature. When you change something complex like code, you always risk accidentally breaking something else. (”I was just trying to change the font, but now the database is unreachable...!”). But this buffer zone of “development” means you don’t have to pussyfoot around—you can try whatever you want, even if it is very disruptive, because you know you’re just changing a copy, and you’ll check it locally before pushing it to production.

This property is one of the reasons I think building software is among the best things you can do with AI. Like humans, LLM coding agents make mistakes all the time. If you let them touch “the real thing” directly, those mistakes might have consequences. If you keep them in the test kitchen, and check the results before you go live with them, it’s much better.