AI is the next layer of software development | @mcclowes

Skip to main content<br>R Reading modeNobody writes machine code anymore.<br>For a good reason - it's inefficient to write.<br>Luckily, we don't need to, because somebody already wrote it for us.

People wrote machine code, froze it into a layer, and now the rest of us build on on top of that foundation without having to reinvent that wheel.

This is a massive part of all human innovation, and in a sense it's the history of software.<br>Assembly hid the opcodes.<br>Compilers hid the assembly.<br>The operating system hid the hardware.<br>Garbage collection hid the memory.<br>Then npm install hid the fact that someone, somewhere, already wrote the thing you needed.<br>Each layer is pre-generated work.<br>You don't earn it again.<br>You build the novel part on top and let the floor carry the rest.

The effort you put in barely changes.<br>What changes is how far it reaches.<br>In 1980 almost everything you shipped, you wrote yourself, because the foundation under you was thin.<br>The same slab of human work today sits on a foundation many times its size, so it ships far more without you working any harder.

So when AI drafts a function from a sentence, it isn't a break from this story, it's just the next iteration.<br>It sits a little above the package ecosystem and a little below the code only you could write, doing what every layer before it did - replacing the work you used to do without a new foundation you can stand on.

What's different is texture, not kind.<br>The older layers are deterministic.<br>Run the compiler twice, get the same binary.<br>This layer is probabilistic, so it drafts rather than guarantees, and you read what it gives you the way you'd read a dependency you didn't fully trust yet.

Though be honest: when did you last read the source of a package before installing it?<br>npm install is also blind trust, most of the time.<br>The distinction is subtler than deterministic versus probabilistic.<br>A bad package either works or visibly breaks.<br>A bad AI draft can look right, pass tests, and ship wrong.<br>That's the real texture difference.<br>It's a reason to stay in the loop, not a reason to reject the layer.

The useful question was never "is this real engineering?" - we answered that when we let the compiler write our assembly.<br>The real question is the same one we've asked at every floor: "now that this is handled, what's the novel code worth writing on top?"

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