AI coding is creating a new generation of makers

Ben Thompson: My Vibe Coding Adventure, The App and the Experience, Ten Takeaways

There are, to be clear, a ton of home inventory apps. A lot of them, however, are made for a single person or are way too complicated or don’t use obvious AI affordances; the new breed of AI-centric apps, meanwhile, trust AI too much, promising to identify objects from a picture of a room and getting half of them wrong (if lucky!). In truth, however, I didn’t really do a deep dive on what was out there: I knew that AI afforded the opportunity to build exactly what I wanted — and no more!

This hits on a couple things I think are very relevant. First is the fundamental draw of developing your own software, which is to create exactly what you need and nothing more. Second, and related, is the fundamental fact that as software gets popular and more people want to use it, the more features it's going to accumulate.

1Password recently updated their pricing, and to justify the increase, they listed out all the things they've added recently that they think brings more value. A common retort to that announcement was that none of those features were used personally by a lot of individuals who got that email. Yes, it's great that they added functionality, but if the product was literally the same as what it was two years ago, a lot of people would be just as happy. Of course, 1Password didn't add these features for nothing. There were customers who wanted that, and even if they are an extreme minority, as you try to solve for everybody, you inevitably have feature bloat as you try to solve every use case. Take AI out of the picture entirely, and software development has always had the appeal of allowing people who are able to do it to create exactly the software that works for them.

I’m extremely excited about an entirely new avenue for hackers and makers. I remember being in high school and college and spinning quaint business plans about building websites for small businesses and whatnot; after all, I knew my way around GeoCities! I can imagine an entirely new generation of mini-entrepreneurs building little custom apps for friends and family, and that delights me. I also love the fact that owning your own hardware and controlling your own networking is clearly the best way to benefit from this stuff: so much tech stuff was becoming appliance-like that it felt like my generation was going to be the only one that actually understood how stuff worked; we’re back in a world where the greatest benefit will accrue to those who like to tinker.

Maybe I'm being too Pollyanna-ish here, but this concept really resonates with me. I'm an elder millennial, which means I was introduced to the internet as a child, and I really got going on it when I was a young teenager. There was no App Store back then. There was no concept that there's an app for that. A lot of stuff you had to do on your own, and a lot of that early internet world was about customization and personalization. There were millions of people who would not at all call themselves developers or even nerds necessarily who learned HTML on websites such as GeoCities. They did it to create fan sites for whatever bands they liked or to customize their MySpace homepage.

The App Store era has really pushed us into a world where learning these basic skills are not required. "There's an app for that." There's a centralized service that just does this for you and probably has a better user experience than what you could create yourself. Everything's closed source. Everything's configured how someone else wants it to be configured.

However, AI coding agents have made it far easier for more people to start building, and it's creating very satisfying experiences for millions of people who had never done this before. Some will mock these new developers for not understanding authentication or security or data handling and all the many things that come along with developing software. But you know what? These people may not be experts yet, but they're learning things they literally never would have thought about otherwise.

I think there's something to be said for the fact that a lot of amateurish and insecure software is being deployed today, and that's definitely a problem that needs to be mitigated. But I don't necessarily think it's just the way this technology has come up. We have an enormous number of new developers entering the space at the same time, and companies have made it trivially easy for these people to deploy code that is immediately available to the whole world.

But that said, it's been heartening seeing people reverse engineer things and build weird little things that they never would have done before. I guess they'd be scrolling TikTok instead.