Why is nobody talking about the why?
Why AI?
By AI I mean the current generation of LLMs and VLMs and not AGI1 in the sense of:
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a theoretical form of AI that aims to replicate human cognitive abilities, allowing machines to understand and learn any intellectual task that a human can.
Right now everybody has a sense of what AI is, at least in the chat form, and has seen how it can help with some mundane tasks. But when you ask why we need AI coding agents, 99% will talk about productivity or velocity, and nobody is explaining why this needs to be improved. Are you telling me that we are not productive or suck? That we are slow? Are you telling me that I can think and code and now I have to articulate to a prediction algorithm a set of instructions and wait to see if it understands what I wanted?
Has anybody measured this in business outcomes or in dollars or whatever currency you use?
This has nothing to do with productivity or velocity. It is mainly about managers and leaders letting their ego get in the way, thinking purely in terms of optimizations. Or worse, it could be completely irrational: the typical case of having a solution and trying to find the problem. There is a blind spot in the industry, and it exists because AI is an outstanding technology (at least it seems to be).
And it is our fault.
We as developers think this is cool. We are the typical innovators in the adoption curve that we must use, and the problem we saw is that we spent too much time doing boring tasks or dealing with the mundane.
For me LLMs are a new UI paradigm, like the mouse and the touch screen. Instead of you clicking or pointing, you describe. Think about that, instead of logging in and navigating a page, many apps could be a text field. “I want a report of mobile inventory.” “Fix the grammar of this blog post.” “Create an image in watercolor of the Petra.” “I want to watch a thriller limited series with some action.”
And like every big innovation, even if there is no problem, like water it will creep in everywhere. Once you have a water leak in your house you understand that there is no escaping it. It will be everywhere. Like the internet is now in appliances and touch screens are everywhere, this incredible innovation to a nonexistent problem will end up being implemented and used in places whether you expected it or not, based on pure gravity.
Footnotes
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I think the dream is to have a Jarvis like Tony Starks and that is what one thinks of AGI. ↩