AI coding is the new blogging

The supply of code is going to explode

If you are my ancient age (58), you remember what the world was like before the internet. There were a small number of gatekeepers to pretty much all media: a few TV and radio stations, newspapers, and maybe for art, museums and galleries. If you wanted to publish something, it got progressively harder the more people you wanted to reach. You had to get through a gatekeeper, sometimes many of them.

Then the internet showed up. In theory, you could instantly publish anything on the web without asking permission, and the whole world could see it. In practice, that required a bit of technical skill - a web server somewhere (pre cloud! Often these were under someone’s desk) and an understanding of HTML to make a page.

Then tools like Blogger showed up. Suddenly, anyone could, shall we say “vibe publish” anything they wanted to the whole world. Now it seems quaint, but at the time, it was shocking. Suddenly all the gatekeepers were disintermediated, one of the favorite words of the time. This generally started an avalanche of other apps that let people create and consume content - YouTube, Twitter, FaceBook, you know them all. Now we are in a world of huge content abundance. Content is cheap, and attention is what matters¹.

Now let’s look at software. Right now (well, until recently at least), there was another gatekeeper if you had a good idea that involved software: the engineer (or if you were an engineer, the time to do the work was significant and a gatekeeper of sorts). Now, it’s easy and getting easier, fast, to create code and applications with AI. Code is becoming very abundant.

In the historical analogy, I think we are roughly in the period where Blogger first showed up. The technical barriers have been removed and, if you are familiar with a fairly friendly but somewhat limited tool, you can get a lot done on your own. It’s safe to assume that those tools are going to get much friendlier, very fast.

It’s going to get easier and easier for ordinary people to go from idea to working code/tool without understanding much of the process, just like it’s gotten very easy to post an image or a video on the internet, something that required a lot of technical expertise and money just a few decades ago.

What does this mean for software? Well, for sure, there’s about to be a lot more of it, and a lot more people doing really creative things that involve code, where, often, they don’t really even think of it that way. Lots of interactions with computers, more complex data analysis, custom interfaces, and so on. It’s hard to predict - going from Blogger to YouTube even is a jump, going all the way to things like TikTok crazes is even harder to see.

If you were in “old media”, you got hugely disrupted, and this will likely happen to “old coding”. But not everyone did - there were tons of new opportunities and businesses to be made. I fundamentally believe that humans are the source of creativity and invention, and that gatekeepers, while often well intentioned, usually do more harm than good. So, I’m happy to see more tools in more hands being more creative, even if it means I myself will be pretty disrupted. Invention, persistence and creativity are what is going to matter now.

In 1990, almost every programmer was a “desktop” programmer. In 2000, probably fewer than 10% were - but we had a LOT more programmers. Everyone in media worked in “legacy” in 1990, and many of them didn’t in 2000, but there were a lot more creators and a lot more money in the system. This is likely to happen, as we shift to from yolo to vibe to lego to … whatever comes next (and this is maybe a topic for next week - we are, I think, seeing a new coding paradigm emerge, the way that Agile emerged from the cloud).

Vibe coding is the new Blogging. It’s still a bit early, the tools aren’t perfect by any means, but it’s getting easier all the time. Things built with code are about to be very abundant. The economics are going to shift from scarcity to abundance. Everyone can be a creator, and there will be all kinds of new jobs and opportunities. They won’t look like the old ones, but that’s ok.

Code is about to change, a lot.

1. I asked Claude to do some research on how much more content there is now: In 1980, the amount of content created annually was limited to thousands of printed publications, broadcast programs, and physical media distributed through centralized institutions like publishing houses and television networks. By 2020, this had exploded to over 64 zettabytes of digital content (equivalent to 64 trillion gigabytes), with approximately 4 million books published annually, 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube daily, and billions of individual creators contributing to an unprecedented democratization of content creation across multiple formats and platforms.
This represents an increase on the order of 10^6 to 10^7 (1 million to 10 million times) more content being created annually. Even if we only consider structured content like books, we've gone from tens of thousands of professionally published works to millions of books plus billions of social media posts, videos, and other digital content.