I wrote this because the current "AI as productivity" is completely missing individual/consumer motivations.
My argument is that we are seeing a Jevons Paradox event for creativity. Similar to how making coal efficient in the 1800s didn't "save" coal but opened up new industries, applying a similar lens of “efficiency” to creative work (coding, writing, art) will allow it to boom. This is a stark contrast to both the narrative that AI will kill creativity and that productivity is its most valuable application.
"While it’s possible low-code platforms will survive by providing non-technical users with the kind of magical experience that’s already possible for developers with AI coding tools today" - that magical experience is available to non-technical users today already. The last barrier is deployment / security / networking / maintenance, but I'm assuming here are a lot of startups working on that.
In a way, low-code has been the worst of both worlds: complex, locked-in, not scalable, expensive, with small ecosystems of support for self-learning.
(Context: worked at appsheet which got acquired by Google in 2020)
Existing tools already do a great job if you just want a magical looking prototype but they're not versatile enough for real production applications where those other aspects you mentioned actually matter (deployment, security, networking, maintenance, scalability, lock-in factor, costs...). Existing tools have focused on creating a 'magical' experience at the expense of all the critical stuff that needs to go under the bonnet.
There's a parallel with LLMs as well. You could build great prototypes with LLMs coding fully autonomously from start to finish... But if you want to build a real production system (beyond a certain low degree of complexity), currently, you NEED human involvement. The reason why you need human involvement is because there's just too much complexity, too much code to manage for a real production system. None of the existing low-code tools actually solve that problem of reducing complexity whilst maintaining production-readiness.
I wrote this because the current "AI as productivity" is completely missing individual/consumer motivations.
My argument is that we are seeing a Jevons Paradox event for creativity. Similar to how making coal efficient in the 1800s didn't "save" coal but opened up new industries, applying a similar lens of “efficiency” to creative work (coding, writing, art) will allow it to boom. This is a stark contrast to both the narrative that AI will kill creativity and that productivity is its most valuable application.
Happy to discuss.