“now suddenly you’ve got Agent Luther here, disintermediating everyone and providing a direct connection to the machine”
Once that direct connection is established, everyone is suddenly capable of reviewing code, changing code and making their own code, and therefore maybe their gatekeeping nonsense is no longer necessary.
That’s the negative version of it. The positive version is that there’s a loss of identity here for an entire class of developers who saw themselves as particularly gifted in this regard, and they were, and they were very highly paid to be able to do the tricks with the computer. Now those tricks have been widely distributed, and they are a little unsure what their place in the future is going to be, which I completely understand. We’ve gone through that many times in history, too: the Industrial Revolution, ATMs.
I just gave a keynote at Rails World last week where I used the parallel of painters who were doing portraits, and then, at the advent of the camera, that was suddenly a different thing. I think the camera is actually a good example here because, just like with software, if you wanted to have your portrait taken in the 1800s, you had to pay a master painter to do it over the course of three months. Who could afford that? Royals, aristocrats and basically no one else. What’s happened now is that we went from maybe tens of such portraits made every month to two trillion images snapped every year, primarily with smartphones. That means everyone suddenly has the capacity to capture a portrait and therefore create a memory.
Now, is the world better off because we went through that? I think hugely so. Was it better off for the people who trained to be really good at photorealistic portraits? Maybe not. Many of them pivoted and became Impressionists and other forms of artists. But that specific skill stopped having economic value in the same way, and I think the same thing is true of software development. We’re now all going to be able to create our own software. The mechanical notion of taking some requirements and turning them into code is not going to have economic value going forward.
[Editor’s note]: “Agent Luther” is David’s reference to Martin Luther, whose challenge to the Catholic Church in the 16th century rested partly on the idea that believers could read scripture for themselves rather than through the clergy. Here, AI agents play Luther, and programmers are the clergy.
Why AI now writes better code than almost any programmer
