The Promise That Wasn’t Kept

Valuable work and meaning is not derived from what AI makes us (apparently) faster at: generating code. Meaning and value in software development is actually created through the impact of building things that makes human lives better, or easier, or slightly less bad.

What’s becoming clear is that the mass adoption of AI is shifting the focus away from human-centered software solutions that provide meaningful value, and is reducing the entire industry to just the tools at its disposal. Just generate the code, bro. Just ship one more app, bro.

I take pride in my work and try to create the best product for my users. I'd be lying if I said I always succeeded, but I'm always striving to do better. How many of the vibe coded apps will just be cookie cutter bland apps that might do the job, but feel more like some boring utility. Boring can be good, but sometimes some nicer touches can provide real value.

There’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced; we all have to start from somewhere. But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learnabout what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

I sometimes wonder what junior developers are going to lose by not starting with the basics and just getting AI to build things. It might be all fine and dandy when the generated code works, but what happens when users inevitably find weird edge cases? Or what if there's a bug? From my own personal experience, I've gained plenty of experience and knowledge from debugging and figuring out where code goes awry. I'm not saying that every developer needs to follow my path or not use any new tooling, but I wonder how much learning is done when you enter some commands into a prompt and code is spit out.