Back to doing other things
I built my mom some software while I made dinner, because building someone an app is now a favour you can do. Is this a superpower, or does it foreshadow a day when code is just another tool?
My mom asked me for a favour.
She wondered if there was a way for her to examine hundreds of pages of documents for a few specific words. The documents came from a dozen people. There were photos. There was text. There were photos of text. Some of the files were very old; many of the senders were, too. There were, dear reader, Wordperfect documents.
This is not a simple thing, even for an AI. You can't just drag a giant .zip file into a chatbot and get smart answers. Not quite yet.
So I did the next best thing, and asked an AI to write me some software.
I described the situation, said, “please generate a couple of documents that list what you found, and in what context it occurred.” And then, for giggles, I said, “using a graph database of all the documents, linking them to all the other documents, by any word in the documents”, because why not.
It wasn't just whimsy. This might not be the last time she asks such a question of these documents, and software that could search them sounded like a useful thing to have.
And then I went and cooked dinner.
About eight minutes later, it had examined all the data, figured out what software it needed to make sense of it all, and designed the app and database. By minute 32, it had the first version of the app. We both kept cooking, and pretty soon, it was done.
And then it occurred to me: We live in a world where you can make someone software as a favour. Instead of “come move my couch” or “can I give you a ride to the airport”, it’s perfectly normal now—or very soon will be—for us to ask a friend to write us some software.
Honestly, it's nice to help. It feels good to be needed. But the AI is getting smarter all the time. I mean, I just taught this version of ChatGPT how to summarize and visualize hundreds of multi-format files. The next version will already know how to do that.
When that happens, my mom won’t need my help. She’ll just ask her AI, and so will everyone else.
That world is going to be weird.
The nerdy version: Imagine having access to pretty much all the calculation and interpretation you could ever want. You can analyze anything. You just need to say the right words. Now imagine everyone else having one of those too.
The much more thoughtful version (straight from my partner when I mentioned this): “I can’t get excited about people just being able to use another tool.”
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe writing software will be so commonplace we won’t really care.
Maybe historians will think it’s weird that between 1995 and 2030 most of our jobs involved sitting in front of computers a lot, and then we stopped, and went back to doing other things.