I can empathize with the author. I'm trying to get my first software business off the ground, and one of my moats was well, having written software. For 20 years. I know that writing software is a small part of a software business, but it was a differentiator. I'm still better off than a vibe-coder, but I think about that.
On the flip side, there's a story of an adventurous young couple who drove through the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. They reported an incident where the road dipped and was submerged in water. Local men were standing around ready, for a fee, to chuck rocks in the water. The rocks piled up so the travelers' tires were able to grip the bottom and they were able to proceed on their journey. After they passed through, they observed in their rear view mirror the men now removing the rocks so the next driver would also have to pay.
I think wishing AI away to keep my moat is like wanting to remove those rocks. It's human to look out for #1 but it's a kind of tragedy of the commons.
I guess a lot of gravediggers lost their job at the end of the black death and no-one should be too sad about that. But I feel that the world will definitely lose something if LLMs put all the Indie software developers out of business.
On the flip side, there's a story of an adventurous young couple who drove through the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. They reported an incident where the road dipped and was submerged in water. Local men were standing around ready, for a fee, to chuck rocks in the water. The rocks piled up so the travelers' tires were able to grip the bottom and they were able to proceed on their journey. After they passed through, they observed in their rear view mirror the men now removing the rocks so the next driver would also have to pay.
I think wishing AI away to keep my moat is like wanting to remove those rocks. It's human to look out for #1 but it's a kind of tragedy of the commons.
[1] https://geoff.greer.fm/congo/