Like so many others I’ve been thinking about the future of my career in software. These LLMs have changed everything. What’s actually left for me? What’s my defensible moat that won’t be crossed before I’ve even finished planning it?

For a second there it seemed like they weren’t great programmers. That was a fun second. Then I thought, well, I have the product vision. Then you start realizing you can feed the genius machine your product analytics and, well, there goes that one too. And this goes on and on. And this problem is not unique to us in software. Far from it.

What I’m left with I think are core beliefs about humans.

There are a few classic quotes from the music world. “Drum machines have no soul”. “It’s not the notes but the space between the notes.” “The notes don’t teach you how to make the music”.

We love music for its imperfections. We love it because it brings us together. And yes, I realize I’m soon to be fooled by an LLM’s ‘soul’, if I haven’t already. I know that time is coming, a time when I’ll have been truly moved by a piece of music, just to learn it was entirely made by the machines. But I think when I learn of my deception I’ll be really upset. Because that’s what it will be, and I don’t think that will change. Why does it matter that a robot made it? Because the humanity of it all is what I was after.

In case this was all getting too flowery for you, there’s this Nikita Bier quote that I love, which I’ll connect to in a moment:

On the side I’ve been building a little project called Music Mini Games. For now it’s meant to help musicians improve. It’s an iOS app (Mac app awaiting review, eye roll), and I let Claude replicate much of the functionality in a web version (though I really haven’t spent much time with that, the quality of the web version might be really low). It’s my little vision, but I realize it’s still part of the old world. If you choose not to be one of the Nikita people, the value of my little app may go to zero fast. What’s the point of this fixed binary of curriculum (even if I add personalization), when a person could be on their own mission and have their education instantly conjured, changed on the fly based on how they are doing and their own meta feedback about the product itself? I guess I could be building that, but then I’m almost competing with the LLM companies. Which I guess we’re all always doing now. Oh well.

I guess all of this is to say I hope there will continue to be space for the “tunes” of software makers. That my little projects will be imperfect. Maybe a few people will like the space between my notes. You should make your own tunes, too.