I was reading this article on Seth Godin’s blog - “Tools and the long tail” - and it made me think about software development’s future.

The article touches on the idea of lowering the barrier to entry into certain areas (such as making movies and music) by offering new tools and platforms that make it easy to create something at almost no cost, or at least lowering costs enough that it’s accessible for anyone to do it.

In the last paragraphs he says this:

And now, it changes again. The number of people writing software tools and games is on the very same curve. We’re going to go from hundreds of software companies to millions, in just a few years.

Change the tools (and their distribution) and you change the future.

Most likely, the same trend will happen with the help of AI. Tools like Cursor, Devon, Copilot, etc. will help drive the democratization of software development.

Everyone can get a subscription to one of those tools, and the free option might be enough in most cases to start building some type of software. Some might be designed to solve specific issues users encountered, while others might be purely focused on creating a service that generates profits.

I have no issue with any of those paths, whatever makes people happy, but there are some questions that have popped into my mind.

  • With AI making software development more accessible, are we going to see more and more software released addressing the same existing problems?
  • How many of those will get released and abandoned?
  • Will they pollute the software environment and just become noise, too similar to existing solutions?
  • Could you get locked into one of these solutions without an easy option to move away once the service is deprecated, stops being maintained, or closes?

AI usage combined with the mentality of a 10x developer (10x engineer) — everything faster, everything out the door the same day if possible — creates a world where you’re pushing out MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) all the time.

Those MVPs are not ready and polished for the real world most of the time.

Are my questions legitimate?

Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see.

But in my projects, I notice a faster and faster demand for MVPs. Once an MVP is ready and working for the cases it was created for, a rush appears: “Let’s put it into Production!” “What are we still waiting for?”.

Which makes me thing that we might see more cases where you see it rushed to be put in Production.

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