Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video]

Blow argues software development hasn't advanced much since the early 2000s. As a game developer, I want to offer a counter point.

In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.

I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?

(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)

The video does actually answer its own title, which is refreshing.

And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.

Good supporting evidence for this is that it is changing your software dramatically if you're making your own personalized software to replace subscription software. That works incredibly well. Also there are some examples of companies doing huge swings they wouldn't have done without it like the AWS emulator that just came out.

It is not the same, it is worst. Nothing seems functional nowadays

If AI solved coding, why the hell is iOS 27 a dumpster fire? Slow AF

I was talking to my friend yesterday about what exactly has AI changed for us. Our lives are still the same( actually worse from job loss anxiety). If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.

My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier.

why is this downvoted?

I find Jonathon Blow to be insufferable, but this is a good talk with good opinions.

Imagination crisis. The people who understand how to architect software are spending their free time on social media saying "%%% IS INSANE" or something about "I one-shotted this %existing thing%".

The people who said building software wasn't the hard part before were right, you still need interesting problems to solve to find interesting things to build. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to find those. There aren't many interesting problems left to solve for other tech bros

It’s not the same , I’m sorry i literally used 20 usd subscription to build software services used to cost $10k+. Ask any sales Doing software sales perception of enterprise software also changed . From magic to “maybe we can vibe code it”