Power Tools

Sitting at my desktop computer and hacking away on a few mobile apps that will help me as I move toward a transition to a minimal tech lifestyle is teaching me a lot about what it might be like to start coding today. I think a lot of what I experienced early in my career is gone. Evaporated. No longer particularly useful. But what remains is definitely going to be important.

The truth is that power tools didn’t mean we needed fewer carpenters. It meant that the way the carpenter worked changed in a meaningful way. A nail gun means that a roof can go on in hours. When we put a new roof on our house it was a job that ran from after lunch until about 4 PM. It was crazy to see it all just…go. Nail guns, magnets on wheels, and a few specialized power saws made quick work of it. It’s going to be like that with application development from now on.

Product Manager To Developer

Talking to an LLM isn’t all that different from a civil sitdown with a senior developer. There is a list of requirements. The level of detail that goes into those early conversations often determines what you get in the end. Back of a napkin requirement gets a back of a napkin implementation. Talking in big blocks gets big blocks. Going deep and getting really specific? Yeah, that’s still the way to get the level of quality you’re looking for. The machine isn’t any different.

To see that I can go in and tell the machine that I want an app in this framework that does these three things and seeing it come back with a solution in under 10 minutes is still impressive to me. It won’t be for long. Expectations will change. But for now, I’m enjoying not typing up all of the nonsense that goes into a boilerplate level application. It’s like the Visual Studio Wizard finally delivered on its promise by being flexible enough and specific enough to be useful enough. All of the initial tasks are going to shift in a different direction.

Technical Designers and Analysts

The folks who sit down and pound out data models and designs are still going to do that work. But their work is going to go to an LLM and straight into the application. They won’t be putting together a design simply for a human developer and tester. They will be doing it for the machine and the human who is still very much in the loop. Yeah, I don’t see a LLM self-healing an application at 02:00 on a Saturday just yet. Someday? Probably. Sooner than I think? Yeah. But not today.

Today we still need to treat the design as though the machine and its handler are going to need to use it together. That will change how things are phrased, perhaps, and what tools are used to make it work. If the designer knows that a human developer and the machine both need to be able to read it (oh, and probably auditors and anyone who might drop in to buy an application or check its quality) then everything they do changes just a little. Fewer ambiguities. A touch more of How and not just What. That might be the biggest change: the designer is the first pass developer.

So What?

Management will see this and act accordingly. Responsibilities and job descriptions will change. Staffing levels will shift. The kinds of people who are hired will be different. The organization will adapt to the power of these tools. Dependence will lead to some unintended consequences that I’m still puzzling over. Most importantly? Labor will be valued differently. This is where the fear lives. This is why we are pushing back on this tech and its adoption.

Nothing is certain. There is no inevitable shift here. But there is benefit that cannot be ignored. Accuracy where it counts. Risk assessment. Finding patterns humans don’t see or can’t look for because we aren’t fast enough. Better software can, in some cases, save lives. No, I’m not talking about yet another social algorithm. I’m thinking about medication dosing. Looking for patterns during treatment. And in the case of LLMs, being able to communicate that in a conversational tone.

Not Done…

I’m not done thinking about this yet. All of the good I see is tempered by the very real challenges and abuses that we know will come as it has with all tech. Our legislatures and leadership will lag by 10 years. We still haven’t figured out what to do with social networks that doesn’t involve burning down privacy rights for users. I don’t expect it will be different with LLMs. That’s why I’m playing with them. By the time the law catches up, it will be too late and the expectations will be baked into the behavior of our organizations, economies, and personal lives.