Much has been said about software recently. A good part of the discourse around the state of things is if software created by individuals or even most businesses will continue existing in the future. After all, why would I pay someone 5$/mo for some fancy note-taking app when I can have claude create that functionality for me in about 20 minutes?
While I'll acknowledge it's impossible to know for sure, we do have recent evidence of the output of LLMs and society's reaction to it to extrapolate from. First, I'd like to talk about written word. LLMs can write some really great software, software that makes billions for companies around the world. The same is not the case for prose. It's clearly evident in the past year or so that people are increasingly attuned to snuffing out AI-generated text. And if people feel the wrong thing is AI-generated, they don't hold back the dissapointment.
Why do people even care?
We could say people don't like laziness, but that's not really it. People don't even like when small tweets or substack notes are AI-generated, and those already aren't difficult to manually fire off a few dozen per day already. We could entertain a general argument that people don't like interacting with something a robot generates, but that's not true either. Like we already covered, people interact with software everyday and don't seem to mind that it's AI generated in part or in totality.
The other example we should consider is art. This one is even more clear with the widespread adoption of AI. It would be easy to call out one of the million examples of AI-generated art that gives people the ick, but I'll instead focus on a truth that seems to have been unshaken by AI: People prefer human-made art. Of course, this matters more to people depending on the situation. For example, people seem to accept when an ad at a gas station is AI-generated, likely because they already didn't like ads at the gas station and they didn't appreciate the art before anyway, even if it had a human behind it. But take things like posters, paintings, even going back to written word which is a form of art itself. People like to consume or use something that has a human story behind it.
Human-generation is valuable because it is hard
This brings me to my main argument. People care that a human is behind it because of something core to us as a species, accomplishment.
Have you ever gone on a backpacking trip? A week or two in the wilderness really pushing yourself, eating goods that are light enough to carry, breathing fresh mountain air, and feeling the chilly gusts of wind on your skin as you take each step forward? At the end of a backpacking trip, there is an inevitable first "societal" meal. That first meal back in society is hard to put in words. It's more flavorful, meaningful, and fullfilling than any meal prior to your trip had been in months. And why is that? Sure, your body might be craving salts and fats, but it's not just that. It's from a sense of accomplishment. Accomplishment generated by doing something hard, and maybe enough of an accomplishment to alter your perspective and life trajectory going forward in a positive way.
This same concept of value from accomplishment applies to groups as it does individuals. Teams of people working on successful movies and games are acknowledged collectively for what they accomplished together, because what they did was difficult. One unique things is that this accomplishment can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Accomplishment of the group = (sum of each person's accomplishment) * (how hard it was to do together)
Software is art
Bear with me here for a minute. When you want to mindlessly scroll on your phone, which app or website do you choose? Instagram? TikTok? YouTube? Reddit? HackerNews? If you had to explain to someone the difference between these apps to someone who's never scrolled mindlessly, you might come off as a crazy person. But to you, you choose one of these to spend some amount of your life using.
Why?
Because there are human decisions behind them. There are people that have built these apps, communities, algorithms, and as nefarious as some in this specific example may be, we have a story behind these entities we are willing to grapple with internally. These people have oppinions and have made decisions about their products based on those oppinions. They have experience and made decisions based on that experience. Humans have shaped things in a certain "way", and the way they've done it continues to matter to us (humans), even in a world where we can do a version of it ourselves.
Software as an Art
People don't appreciate a painting because the artist created the canvas out of fiber and the paint out pigment. They care about the piece the artist created using those things.
The people using software already didn't care about the code we wrote, they cared about how the software felt to use. They cared if the software was user-friendly, genuinely useful, and maybe even fun to incorporate into their day. This is what software engineering is becoming. It's becoming less about the mechanics and more about the style, the finess, the feeling you create in the person choosing to spend their time using your product. For the same reason a person will spend $500 on a painting and not even $5 on the same painting if it were AI-generated, a person will continue to pay $5/mo for something they can AI-generate in a 20 minutes.