Last week I was in a meeting that interestingly illustrates some of the issues related to how Artificial Intelligence can help in Software Development, particularly regarding the need for programmers or someone who understands programming.
A client, with no background in software engineering or computer science, built an Access application in the early 2000s to manage his business. This application worked until 2 years ago when it started throwing an error.
Connection to the present moment – part 1: with AI anyone will be able to develop software, which is actually almost the same thing they were telling us a few years ago about low-code and which already came from back in the Access and Visual Basic days when power users and curious folks could already build applications.
It’s true that some things become easier, that the barrier to entry gets lower and that probably some things that previously someone would pay to have developed will now be done by these new power users… but, looking back, I don’t think anyone lost their job because of it.
Btw remember that error that had started appearing 2 years ago?… during the meeting I took the opportunity to explore what it might be. The client tells me he figured out that Access had a limit of about 32 thousand rows… (any developer can already see where this is going)… I hadn’t used Access in… 20 years(?)… but I had no idea about this… and actually there wasn’t such a limit… long story short… what was happening was that some calculations were being done with “int” type variables when they should have been “long”.
Connection to the present moment – part 2: Vibe Coding FTW… except not. If you don’t understand anything at all, the most trivial things will become insurmountable problems.
There’s always a minimum knowledge that’s important to have, or at least the willingness to learn. And that, apparently, doesn’t change – whether you’re using Access in 2000, low-code in 2020, or AI in 2025.
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