Software development is search through the space of useful/interesting automations. Business is search for product market fit (at the intersection of expertise, capital, problem, etc.) Writing is search for lossless, efficient idea transfer.

AI software development is more search. If we search more, will we find a bunch of garbage? Hell yes. We'll find a TON of garbage. That's not new, though. The world has been writing way more books than you'll ever read, recording more music you'll ever hear, filming more television shows than you'll ever get to watch, etc. A lot of it is garbage, but the good stuff stands the test of time and rises to the top, and I'd rather live in a thriving, flourishing world full of all these things, because there's more cream-of-the-crop when there's more everything.

It's evolutionary fitness operating in the space of ideas. I agree that "maybe later" was indeed a useful mechanism, and maybe even a local optimum in the development methodology search space (which recently experienced a major earthquake!), but evolutionary pressure will bring it back into existence in some form sooner or later.

Where I think/hope this goes is instead of using LLMs to go faster, we use them to do better work. I'd rather someone vibe code up better ways to test things, or use it to do in-depth code analysis and bug fixing, etc., then just pile in features.

I can remember plenty of times in my career there were some “nice to haves” that we didn’t get to, and not having them continued to waste our time over and over again as we kept putting it off.

Time saving work for our software lifecycle that we spent so much time working around. Some of those things we finally did get to, and then spent the next few months wondering why we hadn’t don’t it before.

I'd much rather learn to live in the latter world. That world is based more on validated experience, and less on assumptions about a hypothetical future that hasn't yet been experienced.

Of course, we will perhaps start to atrophe in our skills at projecting futures, which is a real concern. As in "what's the benefit of building robust mental models of the future when it makes more sense to YOLO through it and experience it the results directly?"

It's all a little scary, to be honest. It turns a lot of the world on its head in many ways. Experientially tumbling into things with robust sensing processes... this is perhaps becoming more important than modelling futures in a judicious sense of economizing resources...

I’m still holding out from upgrading to macOS 26 and it’s doing its absolute best to make me accidentally misclick to update

But actually, this principle generalizes. The most correct code is the code that doesn't run. There are no security vulnerabilities in code that doesn't exist. It fails no tests. There are no bugs hiding within it. It requires no documentation. (And doesn't get out of sync!) It incurs no maintenance burden.

The best code is no code.

In weight loss, many people take the approach of add and it doesn't work. Do what you are doing now and take this pill or run further or do more. But mostly the secret is eat less.

In design and engineering, it's often removing things instead of overcomplicating them.

In communication, it's often, remove lots of your side points and just focus on your core argument.

We may have removed a constraint that allows people to do more, but the skill has always been to choose, prioritize and remove the things that are making it worse

To me, it is a survivor bias. How could you know where you would have been now if you built these features of your backlog 4 years ago?

Maybe some things would have been easier and faster, maybe you would have been bigger, got more customers and money. Maybe you would have done a big breakthrough that would have transformed your project into something different and better. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, or worst, or would have led you to bankruptcy.

Maybe there is a security hole that you did well to not spend time fixing because no one abused of it (...yet), or maybe some hackers could have leaked all your customer base to some random forum killing your company because of this missing fix.

The outcome is unsure, but you can't easily consider as a generality that you had not needed them.

If you think about all the projects you don't have time to make that require code but would be really cool albeit have no *marketable* value, making those faster to make and easy to share isn't a bad thing.

I want more cool free things people make out of passion - sure, you could argue using AI removes some of that passion, but there's also a large subset of people who are passionate about their field but not passionate about code, and if they're able to make something cool by feeding the idea in and pulling the token generation slot machine's lever on repeat to get their vision, I still think that's cool.

Of course, there's a line where it's slop, so it depends what they're making. A tool to make music? Cool. An album where it's all AI gen'd audio. Not cool. A tool to modify art/apply filters/modify brushes? Cool. AI art standalone? Not cool.

Basically, is the target something standalone as a product we want to have human creativity in the output expression (art) or not. I don't think of MS office as particular artful, but I'm sure many good books have been written in it.

This line is definitely blurry and full of gray areas. For example, https://www.redwoodrhetorica.com to me is totally fine, but I could see why people find it weird.

Similarly, I'm sure to someone working in or on emacs or vim, they're almost sacred and they view the tool itself as a work of art, such that the idea of using AI to improve either sounds offensive, but as long as VSCode works (which, it has had more bugs lately...) I really don't care if they used Claude or whatever to work on the editor/IDE itself.

Of course, there are projects and features which probably shouldn't make it past the "Should this exist?" filter. Complexity does have a cost - nobody wanted CoPilot in Notepad - but having LLMs doesn't change that, I don't think. It means we can do more, but being selective and having good taste to avoid making something bad by adding unnecessary crap to it was a problem far before LLMs.