I expect we will see an explosion of what might be called “boutique software” as a result of vibe coding. There are endless ideas for websites and mobile apps that never got written or created because the cost to produce them outweighed the benefits they promised. But if the cost of producing them is drastically reduced, then that cost/benefit ratio becomes viable, and those small but great ideas will come to fruition. Prepare for “short form software,” similar to what TikTok did for content producers.
Software development is uniquely positioned to take advantage of AI agents. Large language models (LLMs) are—no surprise—based on text. They take text as input and produce text as output. Given that code is all text, LLMs are particularly good at producing code. And because computer code isn’t particularly nuanced compared to spoken language, AI easily learns from existing code and thus excels at producing code. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Software development futures
The previous point creates a dilemma of sorts. Up until now, humans have written all the code that LLMs train on. As humans write less and less code, what will the LLMs be trained on? Will they learn from their own code? I’m guessing what will happen is that humans will continue to design the building blocks—components, libraries, and frameworks—and LLMs will “riff” off of the scaffolding that humans create. Of course, it may be that at some point AI will be able to learn from itself, and we humans will merely describe what we want and get it without worrying about the code at all.
