Coding Is The Easier Part

In just a matter of days, a wave of rushed AI products exposed how far we are from the robots sci-fi writers spent decades crafting. Remember Commander Data, producing Sherlock Holmes–like deductions from his positronic brain; or WALL-E, spinning his tiny treads across a cosmic hush just to chase a crush. Even Arnie the Terminator was really polite when he decimated several police vehicles, with no intention of grazing a single cop. James Cameron even subtitled the sequence “Human Casualties: 0.0” just to soothe our nerves.

Our actual machines are far from the level of Schwarzenegger excellence, but I’m not beginning this book by rattling the familiar skeletons in the AI closet. That topic belongs in the last part. What matters here is the connected narrative that robots will automagically create entire software suites, clean our inboxes, cure cancers or make coffee in a stranger’s house, with the last one being an unusual holy grail. Some gurus go further, promising the revolution will wipe illustrators, screenwriters, and musicians off the Earth, while the surviving coders will turn into sweaty blue-collars tapping ceramic tiles instead of their clickety keyboards.

But just like WALL-E, we’ve tread this space before. I wrote my first QBASIC video game somewhere around 1996, right around the time Microsoft released IntelliSense, a little helper-bot that could pop up and write substantial chunks of code. It was followed by a long parade of development tools: Heftier code generators, collections of prebuilt components such as Bootstrap, content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal, and low-to-no-code builders such as Replit or Tabnine. Even Figma, the designer’s weapon of choice, was made to spout complete user interfaces. On top of that, gig platforms such as Fiverr began offering ghost-coding for just a couple of bucks.

You’re guessing it right: Communities around these tools kept shouting that developers could finally rest and sip beach cocktails. But the opposite happened, and the number of programmers kept growing over the last 30 years, which brings us to the first irony. Pair the shortage of engineering talent with the ever-growing demand for software, and you get a simple revelation: It was precisely those sleep-deprived programmers who pushed hardest for stronger, more efficient tooling. For example, the JetBrains study shows that three out of four programmers had already embraced coding copilots. Stack Overflow, the site which has been steadily drained by those copilots, reports similar numbers. The result is the same: The people supposedly being automated away were first in line to build – and buy – that very same automation.