The companies that win won’t be those with the most or even the best features. AI will democratize those. The winners will be built on a data model that captures something true about their market, which in turn creates compounding advantages competitors can’t replicate.
If AI is really so good that it will democratize writing code to implement features, then why won’t it also democratize the ability to come up with the correct data model? What makes that one task so special?
Were I to conjecture as to the answer, I would say that business types seem to have a blind spot where they think that every role will be commodified except their own, which is somehow special.
These people think of programming languages as a “oh so you just translate English to code.”
They assume it’s easy to replace programmers if you just had a similar technology to google translate. And that AI is that technology.
some things are easier to change than others. it’s easy to slop on new features, rewrite them etc. changing core models after you’ve built a ton on them isn’t easy, even with ai. the odds it comes up with the perfect data model aren’t great, but for isolated features that doesn’t matter since it’s easy to throw them away and rewrite
Cause programmers never had to fix legacy code or anything.
all of their examples are pre ai anyway. it’s almost impossible to change a core data model thing without ai too.
all the legacy codebases I’ve worked in have very much been shaped by the original abstractions they decided on. as much as I wanted to change them, there wasn’t really a way to do so because of the scale and backwards compatibility requirements
If you guessed it right, your inflexible implementation becomes an advantage against other inflexible implementations.
There, I generated an AGI (actual grumpy ignoramus) summary for y’all.