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Supra Podcast: How AI is changing the future of software development

2025-10-28

I got to join Marc and Ben from the Supra podcast to talk about how AI is changing how software teams operate.

Three things I took away from this conversation.

First, is that there are some things that AI doesn’t change. At the end of the day, you’ve still got to define the problem, define the approach, define the details. AI changes the tools, the artifacts, and the process, but it doesn’t change the basic facts of problem solving.

Second is AI is changing how software is made at three levels simultaneously: individuals, teams, and organizations. Individuals are trying out tools (e.g., Claude Code) and putting them into their workflow. Then there are some teams that are starting to adopt some of these tools en masse and reorganize their processes around them. Finally, there are organizations that are trying to figure out what all of this means for the “standard” way of working and shipping software.

To get this right, organizations need to be willing to change across 4 dimensions:

  • Tools - What are the tools that are available to us? What are their benefits and limitations?

  • Tactics - How do we coordinate with these tools to achieve a result? What are the artifacts that are created? What is the size and roles of people on the team?

  • Training - How do we build competence on these new tools and tactics? How do we give people space, opportunity, and resources to experiment?

  • Values - What does great work look like? What is important and celebrated?

Without all of these working together, organizations will fail to get value out of a transformative technology — and I have to be honest, now is a moment where I’d rather be at a small company experimenting with new ways of working than at a large company where I have to be concerned about how this works at scale.

You can find the whole episode here:

  • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nozDSwSk3fuAK4TQWxm5l?si=oA0qIwIJShqTCjMOLFFC0Q

  • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/81-i-spent-3-months-at-an-ai-native-startup-where/id1737704130?i=1000733726676

  • YouTube: https://youtu.be/GbOw8_JViPA

  • Substack: https://suprainsider.substack.com/p/81-i-spent-3-months-at-an-ai-native

Mike Judge asks good questions about AI shovelware

2025-10-09

Mike Judge has a great piece poking at the AI hype where he asks essentially, “If these tools are so great, where is the explosion of AI created stuff in the world?”

The whole piece is worth a read, but one of the most interesting things to me about it is the data he brings to bear on the question.

He looks at:

  1. iOS app releases
  2. Android releases
  3. Domain registrations
  4. Steam releases
  5. Public GitHub repos created

And then concludes from these that AI coding tools are “bullshit” ending with the call for people who claim that they are now 10x software engineers because of AI, to show the receipts.

First, I want to concentrate on what I love about this. “If this is so great, where is it in the data?” is absolutely the right question to be asking.

And there is definitely a dog that isn’t barking here. The data that he cites aren’t perfect (more on this in a second) and yet really impactful things tend to move really obvious metrics. The gains in life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 are really easy to see.

So on one hand, I love this challenge. On the other, I think he goes too far in calling it all bullshit and saying that it doesn’t work.

I’ll hold myself out as the example that Mike asks for. While I won’t claim to be a 10x engineer, I had never completed a meaningful software project in production before GPT-4 launched. Since then, I’ve coded this blog / portfolio site myself, launched an AI based local news site that has hundreds of weekly readers, and I have a third unreleased prototype that I think could be a real product.

Analyzing myself against Mike’s charts:

  1. I haven’t launched an iOS app
  2. I haven’t launched an Android app
  3. I have bought 3 domains
  4. I haven’t launched a steam app
  5. I’ve created 1 public repo, unrelated to my AI coding work

Now I’m open to the idea that I’m the exception rather than the rule… but I also too humble to think that I’m a unicorn on this dimension.

There’s plenty of room for middle ground here. It’s totally possible that: 1. AI tools are net negative for most software engineers 2. AI tools are transformative for people like me 3. People like me are a minority

Intuitively, I doubt that this is true and yet I don’t have hard data beyond my personal experience to bring to bear on this question. It’s certainly something I’ll be thinking about over the coming months. A more likely explanation in my view is that we haven’t unlocked the right combination of values, tactics, organizational design, and training to unlock AI software productivity at scale… but I can’t prove that at this point.

Worth a ponder.