It seems that the world is just going more and more into AI. It almost feels like we’re on a rollercoaster and nobody’s at the controls…. All the AI I’ve seen so far has been bland, boring and weak sauce in its output…. Am I missing something?
Every advert, every piece of software, every product, every conversation, it’s all about AI just now. In all the adverts, young happy people are cavorting, having so much fun while they get on with exciting things like leaping into the air, or drawing impressive-looking revenue graphs on whiteboards! Wow! How has AI made them so fulfilled?
I mean, in our business all we’ve got is Copilot. I use it to prototype paragraphs for documentation, or attempt to draw a background image for a presentation now and again. But, in reality, I’m so bored with the output it gives. All the images just don’t feel “right”, and all the text feels wishy-washy business-bullshit-heavy. I haven’t even stood in front of a whiteboard yet, let alone draw a pie chart that makes the room nod and smile at me.
I can’t imagine any company that wants to truly innovate and create exciting content like those people in the adverts would use Copilot; It’s the “magnolia” of software tools. Every thing you slap Copilot onto becomes this slightly drab, monolithic wall of slightly slippery text and images, like walking into a house and every wall is painted magnolia, the most boring colour of paint imaginable.
In my 35-year career in IT, I’ve had to deal with all kinds of software, and I can honestly say that the current stacks are terrible for innovation. Its not just Copilot, it’s everything. Everything’s so bogged down with additional cruft, it feels like you’re straitjacketed, unable to flex and innovate. It’s part of why I love retro coding, even though I’m only mediocre at it!
I believe, nowadays so much creativity is wasted through inflexible overbloated software and systems. I did a contract for a waste recycling company eight or nine years ago, and started developing some asset tracking software which had to interface with some internal tools. I had the entire thing prototyped and working nicely until I had to interface it with some existing software which I believe used SAP under the hood. Suddenly, all the fun was gone, and the project ground to a halt. Everything that was working smoothly suddenly had to be rewritten to work in the janky SAP model. In the end, the software simply wasn’t up to the job because of all the internal nonsense needed to route the data within SAP. Instead of having assets tagged and approved in minutes, it now took days… Instead of having interactive, interesting approvals systems, it became a web form. Gah! All to fit in with the bland magnolia SAP.
In another example, recently, we’ve been trying to interface with ServiceNow. It’s taken almost a year to get two APIs written to do something that should be already implemented (in my honest opinion)… In all my experience, it feels like something needs to change! We’ve moved, as a coding community into gigantic monuments to cleverness…
So, I went to visit a subcontractor who’s been working on some code for us and asked them to show me their toolchain. They’ve been incredibly agile, and developed systems in a tenth of the time it’s taken the standard API team. I wanted to know how they were able to move so quickly, and generate such truly dynamic, impressive results.
The answer: Claude
I’ve avoided Anthropic’s tools, as well as anything to do with Elon because of.. well… *waves hands at the general state of everything*. For the same reason I’ve avoided anything to do with Meta, its social media and all its tools. Recently, with Google showing its true colours I’ve closed and moved away from anything Gemini-oriented as well. Given how crap Copilot is, that doesn’t leave many options without going to something based in China…..
I watched the subcontractor work on a new feature and asked him to prototype a new system call that we’d been discussing. To make it, we needed to create some test cases, then read through some documentation, and then build a new capability into an existing system. That all means building lots of boring glue code from the ground up, and then putting business logic on top, then a UI on top of that which drove the business logic.
Around an hour later, we had a working solution. Sure, it was riddled with bugs, and the UX was terrible, but it /worked/. A few changes to prompts, an explanation of the user workflow, and the UX was suddenly a lot better… almost demo-able…. Probably only a dozen or so more hours of dev work to complete something that could go out to testers, with a whole pack of test cases, documentation, commented code, the works.
I’m impressed. It’s not perfect, and it does hallucinate like crazy, but you can speak to it like a person, and get it to hypothesize new scenarios. It’s…. good. But with that comes expensive. There are some people I know paying almost £1000 a month on ‘tokens’ to produce new software and tools. That seems bonkers to me.. until I realise that £1000 is about 1 day of top-level software engineer time which might get you a little bit of design done.
Does this mean we can ditch the humans? Ha! No. Laughably no! Clearly we still need quality developers. The AI doesn’t get it perfect, or even close to perfect, and there will always need to be some tweaking because of political, branding or aesthetic requirements, but I can see that the time of the API developer is coming to an end.
API work has always been donkey work, writing the glue code between systems. Will developers be happy to have AI write the glue code? maybe, I don’t know…. I know some people who love writing ‘contracts’ and documentation, but they’re in the vast minority. Most developers want to create the wholistic system, and see their software used and praised by users around the world.
I do fear that many companies won’t understand that AI is a tool, not the solution. I fear that the most soulless software companies, like Microsoft, Meta, Google et al willl be entering a new era of bland software, designed by AI and tested by AI. Look at the mess with Windows 11… I’m going to bet the timing of all that being around the time everyone at Microsoft was ordered to use Copilot more isn’t a mere coincidence!
But I’m hopeful that the truly talented software engineers working for business leaders who realise AI’s place in the software stack will simply use it as a tool for the donkeywork, while they do the really important stuff like making sure the software doesn’t suck. I think in the long term, those big battleship-grey boring software tools like SAP, Teams, Sharepoint, Salesforce and ServiceNow will ground themselves into the mud, and the agile, innovative software, accelerated by AI as a donkeywork-reducer will begin to win market share.