In Dune’s lore, AI was banned after humanity raged war against it following a thousand years of human enslavement. This was called the Butlerian Jihad which led to the complete ban of computers and thinking machines. Violations of this ban would result in death. For the following 10,000 years, building computers was generally considered a Bad Thing to do1.
This week, Devin was launched. Much is being written about it. Panic is circulating X. DHH wrote one of the first posts that made sense to me. Yes, the industry will change, not necessarily because of Devin2 but because of the urgency that developers seem to want to automate their jobs. All industries will change over the next few decades. Software development will be no different.
Fewer software developers will be needed to accomplish the same outcome. I agree that each level of abstraction and automation will reduce the need for the quantity of developers3. Where I believe we’re not seeing the full picture is the pervasive nature of software.
Software is not only an industry. Industry is software. It has eaten the world far and wide. And it’s still having lunch. We’ve engrained software into every crevice and crack possible. We made it indispensable to drive, to fly, to trade, to cure ourselves. People guarding and building on every single industry known to man will not be out of a job tomorrow. They will be more sophisticated and likely less of them. But we’re missing what happens before then.
Our software industry built processes, methodologies and tools so that our engineering practice becomes more predictable and standardized. These coping mechanisms were not designed with the intent of outsourcing the underlying work. We could make Devin blurt out an update at a standup, but what’s the point of that?
We have built software thinking that the levels of non-determinism were circumscript to people. Now we’re going to inject more non-determinism at light speed into teams, many of which are struggling with things other than ‘speed’ in delivery.
In my opinion, we’re going to see many fumbles, i.e. problems of using AI in software development in an industry not prepared for it. On a smaller scale, products becoming harder to maintain and websites will go down. On a larger scale, well.. How big do you want to bet? Will NASA use Devin?
We will get these fumbles and we will break things because we will be moving fast. The problem is how widespread things are and how critical they are to our lives. So we will see things breaking and it will be easier to say ‘the culprit is AI’.
So the inevitable consequence will be more regulation. The world is already preparing regulations for securing software. AI-built software will scare people the moment they understand that the root cause is poorly outsourced intelligence.
Self-driving is a toy compared to software development. There are so many freaking variables. Coding is larger than the code itself, it’s the people, the collaboration, the negotiation and the tradeoffs. We will try to make AI do it all. But it will hurt.
One could say: AI will be the Software; AI should replace ‘software’ in the world eating metaphor. I think that’s likely. We’re building smarter software and that has happened since software exists. I think Meta or Google will have fewer software developers and one person will be able to do more.
Maybe AI will displace people out of a job. Or make organizations hire fewer people. But it’s likely AI will get itself fired a few times before it gets permanently hired.
The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines…Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.
God Emperor of Dune