Henry Moulton - 14th May 2023
I gave a conference talk on 12th May at app.js and finished with ideas of how AI is going to change how we build software.
app.js conference is a developer conference run by Expo, which is led by Charlie Cheever of Quora/Facebook, I spoke about:
This essay is a part 2 to my talk, it imagines a future where AI can write entire programs.
Software today is built with a long and expensive phase of “development” - today software engineers are paid well to figure out what code needs to be written given some design or product specification.
I love building software, I’ve always found it fun. Back in 2016 I observed that developers were often writing the same app for Web, Android and iOS in the same language and bet on React Native and Expo to change that and write it all in one language and one framework.
Seven years later, that bet has successfully played out and there is yet again another bet, that natural language will supplant programming languages as the way software is written over the next decade.
We’ve seen developer tools for AI like GitHub Copilot be extremely successful, and I’ve seen software engineers from the junior to senior level use ChatGPT for coding help. What comes next? The amount of AI I can use to write code is growing exponentially. With a rapid increase in efficiency in software development, we’re going to see a redistribution of the responsibilities of software engineers and a change in the way more software is designed and tested.