The Lonely Future We’re Building With AI

Are you a medium member? Read the article over on medium.

I was at a Notion conference recently in Berlin. It was a really professional event and obviously AI was the hot topic in the room. One of the presentations was with some startup founders and they were asked about their opinions on AI and what the future would look like.

As a software developer I was appalled by their answers. The last answer in particular predicts a very lonely future.

One answer:

I think we have seen in the last 12 months what AI can do in software. You can produce an app now in a few days and then have it rolled out to users.

Another answer:

I think in 12 months WE (as in we humans) will be set tasks by AI as they can go through data when we sleep and come up with tasks that need doing.

Another answer:

AI is making me so productive that I don’t need to hire nearly as many people now. Companies in the future will be much smaller.

Finally:

I don’t think we’re that far away from the first “$1 billion single man company”

These answered stirred up a whole load of emotions inside me. This is a recurring theme for me nowadays. In this article I will deep dive into each statement and give my thoughts.

I think we have seen in the last 12 months what AI can do in software. You can produce an app now in a few days and then have it rolled out to users.

I am seeing a sentiment, especially in management and people who aren’t in the weeds of Software everyday, that AI can essentially code now. This drives me absolutely crazy.

It’s not helped by people at Y combinator and the like spouting rubbish that all startups in Silicon Valley are now vibe coding their apps in record time.

Let’s get one thing straight.

Building a crappy little MVP in Nextjs with Tailwind that looks like it does the thing you want is not the same as building a scalable piece of reliable software that can really support a business.

But there is a growing gap between what business people THINK AI can produce and what it actually can do in reality.

This isn’t helped by every AI model company CEO telling the masses that AI can produce 60, 70, 80 or even 100% of your code and everything will be hunky dory.

Let me tell you, as a software developer who has been using these Generative AI tools from day one, it‘s nothing like that.

AI is a rampant text generator and fantastic pattern matcher. It seems to know everything right up until the point when you tell it that it made mistake. Then it tells you “that’s a great point” like you’re a god damn genius and then continues to churn out more text. (Oh and I am saying the word “text” deliberately because thats ultimately what it is).

Have you seen the way AI generators produce code? Top to bottom. No developer ever writes code top to bottom. You write it in logical steps and jump around a file to fill in the details as you work through the problem.

The AI is not thinking. It has no intelligence. It just spouts out patterns it’s seen over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly sophisticated pattern matcher and it’s remarkable how far it can get with this skill, but it’s certainly not ‘thinking’.

I think in 12 months WE (as in we humans) will be set tasks by AI as they can go through data when we sleep and come up with tasks that need doing.

This one depressed the hell out of me. AI is going to become our task master? We’re literally going to become slaves to the machine? The person stating this fact seemed quite happy about this future. I was in disbelief.