I’m doing company admin today – tasks I’ve had rough checklists for over the years. Some months ago, I rewrote them in detail, mainly to document the process for Svante, who runs the company with me. Some tasks overlapped with his checklists, but others were things I’d handled without explaining how. Documenting them made sense. What I didn’t expect – given that I already had checklists – was how much more efficient the work has become – less cognitive load and it takes less time.
Many programmers struggle to name things because they try to find an abstract name that covers everything it might do. But names can easily be changed, so choosing a specific name for what the thing does now often unblocks you.
I took Jost Hochuli’s ’Detail in typography’ off the shelf this morning to look up what the full vertical extent of type is called. He refers to it as ’vertical height’ (a somewhat tautological phrase) – or ’hp-height’, measured from the ascender of the h to the descender of the p.
If I look at coding, programming – which is one area where AI is making the most progress – what we are finding is we are not far from a world – I think we are going to be there in three to six months, where AI is writing ninety percent of the code – and then in twelve months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.
But the programmers still needs to specify, you know, what are the conditions of what you’re doing, what is the overall app you’re trying to make, what’s the overall design decision, how do we collaborate with other code that’s been written – you know, how do we have some common sense on whether this is a secure design or an insecure design.
So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer, a human programmer, needs to do – the AI isn’t good at – I think human productivity will actually be enhanced. But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little island will get picked off by AI systems – and then we will eventually reach the point where, you know, the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry.