Changes
I noticed my blog stopped working for some reason. I’m sure you noticed before me because of how diligently you check it for updates. So I had Claude scrape my old posts and import them into some new static site generator. I didn’t really care what it was. I would have used to care, because I would have wanted full creative control and understanding over what was going on. But now I know I can change any aspect of anything, just by prompting.
I looked at my most recent post, it was about designing pleasing APIs for building UI components. I laughed. I haven’t written a UI component in almost 9 months now.
It’s been strange to have a machine start doing what I do, and doing it so efficiently that not giving up control to it would be a form of negligence.
I know my experience is not unique. An entire industry worth of people are experiencing the same things I’m experiencing. It’s frightening and exciting. It’s empowering and deflating. In a way I’m almost no longer constrained by time because of how fast the machines are. And at the same time I’m uncertain of how much longer I will have any economic utility at all.
For now at least, I’m in possession of a language that isn’t known to the general population. A language of describing exactly how a software system should work.
There exist AIs to create any image you can describe, and AIs to create any song you can describe. But both still require a human who knows the language of art and music to describe something beautiful. I love music but I’m not a musician. I can’t describe what I want in a song. I just know it when I hear it.
Anyone can describe an app idea and get something back from an AI. But, for now at least, my own tastes and experiences and sensibilities that I’ve developed over the last 15 years still work as a competitive edge when describing to a machine what I want built.
But it seems inevitable that any taste, experience, and sensibility will eventually be fully distilled into the models, and they will be able to take a generic description of a problem and produce something great. When that does happen, I don’t know what’s left for me to bring to the table.
I am excited about the future, though I don’t know my place in it. Claude’s been teaching me how to take care of our pool. So maybe I can pivot to that. It should be stable until the robot bodies are done.
This blog post, with all its grammatical imperfections, was written by a human with no AI pass.