In his newsletter, Benedict Evans deflates the frothy talk that AI agents and assistants will eliminate vast swaths of software. That theory says that people will just tell the computer what they want; if anyone can use AI to spin up their own tool to do the job, then who needs ready-made software? (The theory is especially popular among engineers who already make their own tools.)
When you actually go and look at successful software, the users generally didn’t see the problem, didn’t see how you would solve it, and could not have sat down and thought about what should happen on every screen, how it should get built, and how you get everybody to use it. There is an enormous difference between knowing something about how your company and how your job works and being able to identify a set of problems and a set of workflows and think about how those could be automated.
In other words, the fact that you’re writing the code in natural language doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work out what the computer should do.
As AI’s capabilities grow, figuring out where to aim those superpowers becomes especially important.
Understanding the problem, imagining a fresh solution, and crafting the ideal experience… all of that is really hard to do when you’re burdened by the assumptions and expectations of how you’ve always done it. This might be non-intuitive, but the burden of experience means that the people in the trenches are often the wrong people to design the new solution. DIY tools will only take them so far.
Software design is harder than it looks. So is process design. The new era of intelligent interfaces doesn’t mean that we just toss users into the deep end and hope for the best.
Software and user experience are changing, but they’re not going away. Domain- and context-specific solutions will continue to be critical in order to give people the context and platform to do their work, especially inside complex organizations and processes. The future is much more likely to be AI embedded inside a million bespoke workflows, not a million bespoke workflows jammed into a single AI interface.
For product leaders and designers, that’s a big opportunity. What dramatically new tools and exceptional experiences can we create for our users?
