Let's talk about Photoshop, shall we? I suck at Photoshop. Always have, despite taking an in-person course (in Photoshop 2.0!) and at least three online courses. I started hacking at Photoshop when people were still using it to retouch photos, fer chrissake, then adopted Lightroom when Photoshop became too bloated to use on photos, then adopted Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 while still trying to make headway against Photoshop, then abandoned Lightroom when they abandoned cataloguing. Photoshop, meanwhile, got folded into "Creative Suite" which meant you were heavily penalized for buying Photoshop when for less than double the price you could get five other programs you'd never use. So yeah, you'd pay $1100 or some tedious shit to get the whole thing, then $100 or $200 to update it, but mostly you torrented it because fuck you, Adobe. Then it got folded into Creative Cloud and yeah, you could rent Photoshop for $30 a month but you could rent all of Creative Cloud for $50 a month! But then nobody rented Creative Cloud because fucking hell you can do 90% of what you need in Canva. Effectively for free. Adobe tried to staunch the bleeding by paying $20b for Figma, but it didn't work. instead they had to pay Figma $1b for letting Canva eat their lunch while they fucked around trying to buy themselves out of a problem. Adobe is dealing with AI by forcing everyone to use it and hiking their prices, which Barclay's thinks is bullish. My kid's art class is learning photo editing in - wait for it - Canva. Her friends do their video editing in CapCut, because of course they do. Meanwhile she is the undisputed heavyweight champion in the world because I spent 10 minutes showing her how to punk around in iMovie. Thousands a day!? But it's money incredibly well spent! Your engineering org will start to be able to go as fast as you want them to go, for once. Can you believe it? It'll be like being a startup again. You’ll be able to “surprise and delight your customers”, as Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, at an elite level you never dreamed possible. Who's got two thumbs and knows what Jira is? This guy! Because I beta-test. And in the past ten years, the three platforms I beta test have moved from Jira to Centercode because Jira is bloated and expensive. Two of those companies? Publicly traded. The third? One of the biggest privately-held firms in Hollywood. I don't know about one of them, but I know the other two have a coder or two in the US working on any given feature and an army of offshore developers. You are now aware that Pro Tools is largely written in Ukraine; Putin really fucked up my beta schedule, albeit only for about four months. So. Are these firms going to trade off AI for offshore development farms? Maybe if it saves them money and time but we've got bugs that we know what they are and we know where they are and we know they aren't getting squished because for the past fifteen years those bugs are a consequence of legacy code that supports this one studio that can't change out this other piece of code and bloody hell if you lose that one studio you're sunk so the entire rest of the world deals with this one rare error that pops up all of a sudden. Are... you going to explain to the AI fleet why that bug has to stay? I know four CRMs. How wretched is that? Two of them I know because there have been hints of APIs that allow me to talk to the two CRMs we run, and the two CRMs we run are that most wretched of CRM, known as the EHR. Yeah. We run two EHRs. I know. Because one is good for naturopathic medicine and the other is unparalleled for midwifery. One of the EHRs? It's got two coders. Neither of them like me. They were willing to give me access to their API for long enough to get Zoho running for $10k. I opted out, since they said "we support Zoho" when in fact they meant "our db will theoretically interface with Zoho's db." The other has one coder. His name is Mohammed. I had a great conversation with them once where I explained what an API was. They thought it sounded like a cool idea. They've been working on mobile (yes, I know) for six years now; interfacing with my phone system sounded like science fiction to them. Now - I know what you're thinking. Mohammed needs an AI! Goddamn right. Just think of what Mohammed could do with a $50k "fleet" of AI agents, other than burn through six months of budget that needs to be passed along to a legion of independent shoestring-budget alpha females. Why, he could create a mobile app! He could integrate with phone systems! He could integrate teleprescription!" I can tell you what he did do with AI. He changed the text box in one of the description fields into an RTF box in one of the description fields and broke everyone's records going back to the dawn of the system; everyone's records are now full of " "s everywhere. Took two days to roll things back. Now - I know a guy. Has worked for Salesforce for like 20 years. His job? Assess your needs, assess Salesforce's stack and custom-build a Salesforce CRM for your organization. His department has been shrinking gradually because Salesforce wanted $150 per user per month to glue my phone system to my EHRs. Now they want $80. "Hey OpenAI, configure this pre-existing Salesforce stack to work with this pre-existing accounting software" is something an AI should be able to do, particularly if you can blame the customer if it doesn't work. Of course, you might end up injecting " " everywhere and having to revert. And we've got a computer science masters' student on our network right now. Her thesis is going to be about tricking the API of one of our EHRs into coughing up useful data we can use to show insurance companies. These are metrics the software is required by law to collect - that whole "HIPAA" thing? It's the Health Insurance PORTABILITY and ACCESSIBILITY Act, there's no "privacy" in there anywhere - and yet, what she gets is blanks and garbage. Masters' student. Thesis project. She's salty that we aren't running EPIC because why wouldn't you run EPIC? Because at my size, EPIC is $30k a seat to buy and $3k a month to operate. And every hospital pays it. Because they have human coders, who solve your problems, who make it all work, and make it so your data can be sent anywhere. EPIC? Epic isn't gonna fill your text fields with " ." _________________________________________ Look. You think I might be able to fumblefuck my way through "vibe-coding?" I'll bet I could. I know how to trick Google into giving me what I want, and what limited entertainment I've derived from OpenAI has turned out exactly how I wanted it to. I could certainly do worse. And my phone system has an API, and one of my EHRs has an API, and I'll bet I could "vibe-code" some glue-ware that would open up my EHR when the phone rings, scan for a known phone number, feed a hit into the phone system so the name pops up automatically and open the EHR so that my receptionist can get some deetz about who she's talking to. This is literally the ORIGINAL SIN of CRMs. It's what they were CREATED to do. It is the only reason they fucking exist - CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT. But what I know? Is if my finger into Google Workspace drops below a threshold of $5 it will stop returning API calls requiring regeneration of the key or else not only does voice transcription fail, the callback to another service I use fails which fails something else and the whole voicemail system goes down. Ask me how I know. Better yet, ask me how long it took to get an answer about this out of Google because the answer is "never" because there's no documentation on any of this shit and you think I'm going to hand over this much mission-critical shit to Microsoft CoPilot or some shit when Mohammed brought down an entire EHR by asking for RTF? Mohammed? Who codes for a living, rather than to just eke out a little extra time to hang out with my wife? You know what I don't need? A tunnel borer. Because there's buried electrical and natural gas in there and I don't need a fucking tunnel. I need two guys who know how to put in drip irrigation, and I will pay them, and I will manage them, because if you just YOLO into this shit you get surprise landscaping. Coders? And people who write about code? Suck bawlz at considering where the code lives. What the code does. And I don't know that we'll ever know what knocked out Telefonica? But my money is on "vibe-coding."And don’t get cocky and try to push it too hard. A coding agent is like a big-ass tunnel borer machine when you've been using power shovels. It is strong, sure, hella strong. But it is expensive, it can still get stuck badly, and you need to guide it carefully at all times. And it's not that fast – it's not going to bore through the English Channel in a day. So don't set unrealistic expectations going in. Just focus on how different this stuff is from 2 years ago when ChatGPT came out, and then marvel at how different it is from 2 months ago when the best we had was chat.
For you CIO-types, fleets will enable your developers to spend thousands of dollars a day. Even if inference costs plummet, the Jevons Paradox will result in higher usage offsetting those costs. If you don’t believe that, go ask to see your bug backlog; it’s basically infinite.