2035

The year is 2035. AI has become an integral part of everyone's lives. It has replaced people in many professions. There are few people writing books for any other purpose than their own entertainment. Teachers are taught about in history chats by the AI tutor. The first time a human sees the script of a movie is when they sign the contract for the studio to use their likeness in the computer generated end-product.

Used to be if you had a business idea, you wanted to take online, you had to approach a company who made software, to make it for you. That cost a considerable amount of money and you had to spend hours in meetings, than wait months for the finished product to be ready for launch. Developers are no longer needed. AI can generate a software without assistance. In the early days, AI was a little silly and inefficient when generating code, now it avoids mistakes. You just tell it, what you want and you'll have it. No meetings, no months of waiting, no exorbitant prices.

You just woke up with a business idea: A ride sharing application. You can register as a driver who can offer their car on the way to somewhere, or you can register as a passenger who needs a ride to somewhere. If your routes overlap, you are matched by the system. It's good for the planet and can work on a subscription plan.

You sit down before your computer and start chatting with the AI.

Oh this tool is really great, you haven't thought about that.

You become confused. Didn't you say “any mobile phone?”, but you quickly realize, how ambiguous that is, so you clarify:

Smart ass. You get anxious however. What could it mean?

Oh no, that's the opposite of what you want.

You have spent weeks studying the most common backend architectures, their advantages, disadvantages, the decision making points. You recognize now, that the AI was a little ambiguous as the number of active users and their locations doesn't directly correlate to your architecture, you could use different architectures with different implications, You also know, that making this decision early on is important, because otherwise the application will not know, what kind of backend will it need to talk to and how it should talk to it.

You feel a little frightened.

You left the AI at that point. Now you know some about handling personal data.

Suddenly you feel very tired.

The loading spinner appears, you step away from the computer for a few minutes. When it finishes, a demo of your application appears on the screen. You start playing with it. It's bad. It doesn't look how you imagined, it misses stuff, and it completely messed up the driver-passenger logic you had in mind. You wanted for it to be a setting in every ride, not per user. Looking back at the chat history makes you realize, that at least this was your fault. You didn't notice the way the AI was describing this setting. It doesn't store any date information either, so you can't know if the ride your looking at is still actual or not. It doesn't filter out rides that are made by you. It doesn't let you tell if your looking for passengers or a driver. When you give your address, it doesn't help with auto-completion. You don't like the UI either, the colors the shapes are all off. And on and on.

It seems you have to exactly tell the machine, what you want from it. It might guess some things right, and it skip the most generic parts, but what YOU want, it may not know.

So you start typing again.

I want users to specify if they are drivers or passengers for every ride, not store the information when they are registering. I want to store the date a ride was created and I want to list the most recent ones. Rides can be also available or unavailable. Only list available ones. The address field should allow auto completion. You shouldn't see rides, that are made by you in the list. I want rounded buttons and a green theme….

And so you continue. You try not to be even a little ambiguous, but it's difficult. You wander if there are tools for expressing logic concisely and clearly, but you're here now, so you don't bother looking for them yet. You specify the color for each element, you tweak borders by trial and error, until you're satisfied with them. You iterate and modify your wording on details, until searching for rides is a breeze.

Naturally you forgot to tell the AI, that the threshold would be a user setting, but that's a quick fix. The waypoints weren't precise enough and jumped all over the place, you had to investigate a lot through trial and error. It turned out, the mapping library was misconfigured.

That's it, your app is ready, after months of work, you tell the AI to launch it. After another few days of questions and decisions and reading legal documents, it becomes available in stores.

You're happy, the world is a better a place and you have no more work to do with it. If there are any issues reported, the AI can find the problem and fix it easily.

But the issues pile up. There are some, the AI was able to fix, but there are a lot, where the AI chose an approach to fix the bug, but that broke something else. Sure, it introduces new tests every time an issue is found and after a while, the situation could stabilize, but that won't help the launch. And if the launch is ruined, there's a good chance your app will fail.

For a few days, you try to fix issues manually, but alone you're not enough to keep up even with the help of the AI.

You're finally forced to shut down your app.

The situation is grim. You spent months working on this product and it isn't able to pay for itself. You need to find a job.

You look silently at the monitor.

It's a shame, developers are no longer needed.