AI lowers barriers to building task-specific tools
Evans discusses how AI lets people create tools without being engineers or writing code, contrasting this with software built in advance and considering the possibility of software becoming dynamic and generative.
Supporting evidence
AI, tools and transformation — Benedict Evans
Original excerpt
But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. You can just ask the model to make the tool for you, or, more fundamentally, just do the task for you itself . Instead of having to create those tools one at a time, software might be dynamic, generative, free-form, and spontaneous. Massively more tasks can be automated, with massively less software.
Context
It can be very tempting to think that AI will sweep most of this away. There’s an old joke that an engineer is someone who’ll spend an hour building a tool to automate a task that would take 10 minutes.
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