What was the original purpose of software? Why did the industry come to exist in the first place?
It was to make things easier for us. To address the things humans aren’t very good at. A bit of yin and yang in the world. Us humans, typically, are great at empathy, at communication, at relationships, at critical thinking, at creativity and at novelty. Empathy as the most important. We have this amazing ability to see someone else’s point of view and understand why we might feel something/take an action if we were in their shoes. Although a lot of the problems in the world today come from people not doing enough of that.
There are things we humans are bad at though. Imagine I asked you to just receive some forms people fill in, validate the data, do a bit of calculation on the input and then send the output on. And that’s all you’re going to do every day, for 8 hours, 5 days a week. Aside from being bored out of your mind, you’d also probably do it wrong. That’s not a slight on you, dear reader, or on the fact that these roles do need to exist, it’s just a reality of human nature. Most of us would get it wrong. Alongside that mundane task, if I also asked you to store in your mind every piece of data you come across whilst processing the inputs, and be able to regurgitate it at a second’s notice, you’d think I was mad. Our brains are great processing machines, and they do a pretty good job at storing information… Recall and working memory let us down.
We can’t run complex algorithms in seconds, and sometimes our emotions affect our decisions. Sometimes, this is a good thing. But herein lies the problem with the current state of the majority of the tech industry. The people in charge, the people leading, the enormous, capitalist, make money at all costs organisations have forgotten this. Software, computers, technology… foremost, they should make people’s lives better.
I’m reading Enshittification by Cory Doctorow at the moment (highly recommended, as is his blog). The case study on Google is fascinating. In court hearings, internal memos came out that showed Google actively pushed to make Google Search results worse in order to make you search more often. You know what happens if you search more often? You see more ads, which means Google makes more money. Similar stories exist for Facebook (leave MySpace and join us, we promise not to spy on you), Amazon (you can buy anything, and we definitely won’t undercut the sellers) or Apple (spying on people is bad, buy an iPhone, but we will also spy on you).
The ‘personal computer’ should be something that is filled with things that are personal to us, that help us. Not subscriptions that we pay for a below-par service that is getting worse. But hey, if the stock price goes up, that must be good, right? I realise I’m saying all of this as someone who has worked for two big tech companies. It’s why a couple of paragraphs ago I used the word majority of tech companies. I’ve seen both sides. I’ve seen the enormous, capitalist, make money at all cost organisations (hey AWS) and seen what a tech company looks like that cares about its people and in the main builds products that make users’ lives easier.
This isn’t a slight on people on the ground at tech companies either. There are thousands of brilliant people at these companies. But a mandate from above to push AI into every single crevice of every single part of every single product doesn’t leave these brilliant people with much choice. Because remember, in 2026, if your product doesn’t have an AI chatbot, it’s worthless (also said as someone who is actively working on an AI chatbot).
None of that is to say the technology itself is the problem though, it’s how, and why, it gets used. There are genuine, brilliant use cases for LLMs and the chatbots built on top of them. The human weakness I mentioned earlier, that recall and working memory let us down? That’s one of the things an LLM can be good at solving. Summarising huge amounts of random information into something a person can actually digest. Used well, a chatbot isn’t there to keep you searching for longer, it’s there to get you to the answer faster so you can go and do something more useful. That’s a good use of the technology, and it’s the bit of this whole thing I still believe in. Although, when said chatbot has a habit of making things up and hallucinating things do get a little less valuable.
There is a paradox with the current use of large language models (LLMs), particularly for software development. It gives a huge number of people the power to take back some element of control and build systems for their personal computers that are personal to them.
I’m a trustee of a local food bank, I manage all of their IT systems. Recently, I’ve built some custom software for them. Nothing fancy, at it’s core, it’s a database with some validation on the frontend that can send automatic text messages. Previously, with a full-time job, I wouldn’t have had time to build it. The food bank would have gone on with a pretty inefficient process, or bought some cloud subscription that kind of gave them the right functionality but not really. AI coding assistants enable me to build something that works for me. It’ll never be sold, we’ll never charge a subscription, we’ll never ask people to pay for it or enshittify it and sell everyone’s data. We’ve just built a tool, that makes everyone’s lives easier.
Whilst I’m not suggesting you go and try to build the next Amazon/Netflix/Google/Uber with your laptop and a Claude subscription. Although it never gets old watching the hilarity of seeing people try to and fail dramatically because, ya’know, distributed systems are hard. But a lot of the problems that come with large scale systems don’t apply when your application is small, has 10 users who access it intermittently.
I’d still consider myself an AI skeptic, but equally, I’m not afraid to go all in on the tools if I think the outputs can add value to people’s live.