A significant shift is underway, undoubtedly. Yet, amidst the upheaval of AI, grounds for hope emerge.
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<div class="article-column__content">Recall the era of “Internet time“? That was in the late 1990s, an age where dot-com companies accelerated so rapidly that establishing businesses and accumulating wealth was a matter of months, not years.
That period feels remarkably antiquated now.
I believe we’ve entered the “AI time.” What once took months now unfolds in weeks, even days. Indeed, some developments might even be measured in hours.
The sheer pace of transformation over the past few weeks has been astounding. It’s almost as if, overnight, the need for manual coding diminished. Naturally, this rapid evolution has sparked widespread apprehension. Developers are grappling with concerns about widespread job cuts, the future role of junior developers, and even their very existence.
This sentiment seemed to reach a peak with Matt Shumer’s article, “Something Big is Happening,” which quickly gained traction last week. (It’s rare for a .dev article to reach the prominence of the Drudge Report’s headlines.)
Shumer accurately captured these anxieties. And rightly so. Such fear is not unfounded; it’s a completely human reaction to seeing years of dedicated professional mastery potentially superseded by a machine. This represents a genuine setback, even if subsequent developments prove beneficial.
Previously, I discussed how code generation is no longer the primary impediment. I highlighted that deciding *what* to develop becomes significantly more challenging when the capacity exists to create twenty solutions instead of merely two.
If you’re reluctant to let AI generate your code due to potential errors or stylistic discrepancies, consider this perspective: the same can be said for any human developer on your team. No individual will produce flawless code perfectly aligned with your architectural preferences. You readily entrust tasks to colleagues; why then hesitate to assign a project to an unwearied programmer capable of execution hundreds (!) of times faster than any person?
It is precisely this “hundreds of times” acceleration that generates widespread apprehension, and justifiably so. Numerous corporations—including Salesforce, Amazon, and Microsoft—are implementing workforce reductions, attributing these decisions partly to automation and AI-driven efficiencies. A paradigm shift is clearly underway, impacting countless individuals’ livelihoods. Thus, a measure of worry is warranted.
Despite the current unrest, there’s ample cause for optimism. Garry Tan, YCombinator’s CEO, recently stated, “Our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are.” While I acknowledge the genuine distress associated with job loss, the very technology prompting these changes is also poised to unleash an explosion of innovation. This surge of new concepts will, in turn, generate fresh employment opportunities.
I’ve long maintained a collection of quirky, unconventional, and potentially groundbreaking ideas for applications and websites. Some are straightforward, others more ambitious, but all previously demanded more development time than I could spare at their conception. Now? I brought one to life this past weekend. In fact, I completed it on Sunday afternoon.
I’m certainly not implying I’m ready to resign from my current position, but consider the implications if the hurdle for implementing an idea shifts from requiring “six months of dedicated evenings and weekends” to being “finished before I can even prepare dinner.” Countless individuals will soon possess the means to transform an idea into a venture, empowering them to leave their conventional employment and recruit staff to realize their business ambitions. Instead of merely ten new digital enterprises emerging weekly, might we see a hundred, or even a thousand? The potential appears limitless.
Furthermore, beyond new job descriptions and responsibilities, we’ll be pioneering creations that are currently beyond imagination. The concept of “Let a hundred flowers bloom” is set to evolve into “Let a million flowers bloom.”
As we navigate “AI time,” ideas will no longer be constrained by waiting for authorization. They can materialize almost instantaneously upon their conception.
