Why Not vs What If

Building a whole app in a few weeks

I had the privilege of being on the founding team of what became Google Docs. It was an interesting experience in many ways, but one of them was experiencing firsthand the dissonance between people telling me it was a terrible idea (not just Writely, but the cloud overall), and the half million or so people who were using and loving it.

I’ve been hearing AI is a bubble, doesn’t work, vibe coding is terrible, etc. And yet, in the past 20 or so days, a piece of scaffolding that I built, that I call a “dev machine” has been running independently, building out a pretty complete online copy of Word - collab, import, all the editing features, etc. It has two test pipelines (one at the code level, one for rendering fidelity), a CI deployment pipeline, does refactorings, performance tests, and so on. I doubt I will make it fully public, but I use it to edit markdown - it’s wonderful for that, and adding that feature was as simple as asking for it to be added to the backlog.

Dissonance, again.

Why do we get this dissonance? I think there are a few reasons, but they more or less boil down to emotion. When we see something disruptive, that challenges our world view, we are personally challenged - our place in the world is threatened, and our ego, about how well we understand the world, gets hurt. We react emotionally - either with humility and learning (hey, maybe I didn’t understand something about the world!) or rejection (I can’t be wrong, so New Thing must be).

So then we want to tell a story about the emotion. People are often confused, and think the story comes first, but it doesn’t. We justify the emotion with the story, not the other way around. And most things are complex - they have many dimensions to them, some good, some bad, some accurate, some not. So it’s very easy to pick one or two dimensions, focus on them, and find a “why not” story. Or sometimes we just have selection bias - “AI coded badly sometimes, therefore it codes bad always”, for example.

“Why not” stories are stories where our emotion is negative, and we are trying to justify it. “What if” stories are where we are more positive in our emotion and are looking for “what happens if” the new thing is true.

With software, the “why not” stories are mainly that a) the code is bad/insecure/something and b) programmers will all be out of work. Both are a little true: some AI code is bad, particularly if you use the tools badly (don’t test, etc). Some programming jobs are going to go away, no doubt - the nature of software just radically changed.

But…neither capture the full story. We are going to have a LOT more software - we like software, it’s computers doing things for us. It’ll probably be more like media - everyone can be a creator, there are new platforms that support common needs (for media, distribution, moderation, scale. For software, safety, scale, maybe distribution, probably some new things). There will be new things to do with software - lots of folks who are part of big teams now may be independent, and happier (just like it was hard to make a living as what we now call an influencer back in the pre-internet days - and now the world is much richer for the fact that many people can bring their creativity to the space of media).

I’ve been really astounded at what these dev machines can do. I have 5 of them running now - but 3 of them are paused, waiting for me to test them and give feedback, done with their tasks. I don’t feel useless, to the contrary, I have a lot more to do now, and I have to be very careful where I spend my time and attention, because I get overwhelmed if I’m not careful, with all of the things I can build.

No one really has the answer to AI, not me, not any pundit. It’s complex, fast moving, multidimensional. We all want ways to navigate it. The best way is to tell the “what if” stories when you can. Try to observe yourself - when you tell a “why not” story, try to separate from your emotion and look at it as dispassionately as you can (or even talk it through with AI!)

I am excited, exhausted, and yes, somewhat worried about all of this. All kinds of unpredictable change is coming. But every day, I remind myself to think “what if” and not “why not” if I can.