There is a legitimate though increasingly tenuous argument that coding agents are not necessarily raising the ceiling of human performance. What’s less controversial is the impact on the other end of the spectrum: raising the floor is going to be supremely useful.
Which brings me to the JSM conference website. I’m excited to be attending this August but the UI of the program is atrocious: I essentially have to more or less read through the entire list of sessions to figure out what’s interesting and then maintain a separate list to manually detect and resolve conflicts and finally manually add events to my calendar.
But no longer! For a mere fraction of my attention and Anthropic subscription I made my own UI! I’m a little biased but it works so much better for the way my mind views the world. And indeed with the underlying data it’s easy enough for anyone to create their own UI. Suppose you’re really into networking: you could organize around people and emphasize connections. Or you’re part of a research group and want to coordinate together to cover wider ground. In a world of expensive development you get a one-size-fits-none version. In a cheap world (this was 20 minutes of clock time while I watched a movie) you can have unique UIs for everyone.
The hype seems to be recapitulating the flaw of the no-code experiments in the past. No regular person is all that interested in making a website or app. That doesn’t improve their lives in a meaningful way.
But everyone has experienced a terrible UI for scheduling at their local gym or selecting classes at school. My friend made a custom website to reward his kids. My cousin-in-law wrote a custom tool to track his cycling training. These are all very technical folks so it’s not like we’re democratizing development just yet, but I think the appeal is there. Making software more personal has a broad positive impact and UI seems like the first place to start