Yesterday, I’d finally had enough. I was trying to play around with my old CMS, WriteFreely, and I broke the style. It wasn't the CMS’s fault, I was basically "hacking" it, but I decided that instead of fixing it, why not just build one from scratch?
At the beginning, I hesitated.
I remembered doing the same thing back in uni, a few (well, more than a few, I’m afraid) years ago. I was younger, I had more time, and I was just discovering Go. I created a small CLI tool to manage my blog, converting MD files to HTML and handling the file serving. It was a fun project, but it was simple, and it took me weeks.
Now, I wanted more. I wanted an elegant web interface, a WYSIWYG editor, and a deployment on a serverless platform like Cloudflare Workers using tools I’d never touched before.
It took me two hours. And it looks incredible.
The reality check
Excited, I shared the news with my friends. I’m lucky to have a group with diverse backgrounds (not everyone is an engineer) which gives me a much-needed reality check. Instead of the "congrats" I expected, the reaction was… more complex.
I’m now sitting with a profound sense of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, it is objectively incredible that I can achieve in two hours what used to take weeks (or what would have cost a company millions in consulting fees just a year ago). On the other hand, the implications are terrifying.
We are seeing a collapse of barriers. Just as the printing press democratized information, LLMs are democratizing the ability to process data and write code.
There is also a darker economic reality at play. This shift could disrupt the market so profoundly that even giant software providers might disappear. Furthermore, much like how industrial automation didn't actually reduce the workload but instead increased the 'surplus value' extracted from workers, AI risks alienating us further. We move from being creators to being mere supervisors of 'regurgitated text.
In my view, I see AI to the era when amphetamines were seen as a harmless "study aid." It’s highly accessible and unregulated, just like these drugs were. And because there’s no social rejection of its use, we’re diving in headfirst without considering the long-term systemic effects.
What if, by skipping the "tedious" tasks, like summarizing a text or debugging a basic script, we are skipping the intellectual training required to actually think? If the next generation never has to struggle with a problem, will they still have the capacity to solve one?
As a developer, I feel like I have a superpower. But as a member of society, I wonder if we’re building a world that won't require (or even allow) us to think for ourselves anymore.