I’ve been writing about AI over the past few months. Building MCP servers, learning now to effectively use AI to build and maintain software, and more.
I’m at the point now where I no longer have doubt that AI is useful in software development. To get there requires some learning, the “vibe coding” thing is hype, but once a human understands how to work collaboratively with AI the productivity boost can be 2x up to 20x depending on the task.
(that 2-20x is not just from my experience, but is also from the experiences of numerous other developers I have polled)
I was recently in a conversation about why AI seems to have such a powerful boost for software development, and yet seems anemic in many other scenarios.
My personal thought is that this is yet another example, like so many over my career, where software developers are able to apply technology to our own domain because we understand our own domain and so we have intimate knowledge of how we’d want to change or improve it.
If history is any guide, we’ll use the lessons learned in recreating our own problem domain to apply AI to other domains in the future. I very much suspect this is what will happen.
Just look at the radical improvement of models and related tooling for software development over the past few months. We’ve had new models that are substantially better at understanding and creating code and related assets. Perhaps more important is the improvement in the tooling that enables the LLM models to interact with code, understand context, and assist developers in a more meaningful way.
The model improvements should impact all domains, and probably do. The deficit is in the tooling that would allow a model to interact with a Powerpoint deck, or a spreadsheet, or whatever external apps or systems a user might be working with.
Most tools have been written to be used by humans. And they often also have APIs that are designed for use by other software. None of the existing interfaces or tooling is designed for use by an AI, and that limits the ability of AI to use those systems like it can interact with modern software development tooling like VS Code.
I hope this happens in 2026, that we take the lessons learned in building so many different software development tools like VS Code and Cursor and apply them to other domains, enabling AI to interact with a wider range of tools and systems in a meaningful way.
At the very least, I wish I could have AI create and modify Powerpoint decks at a level similar to what it can do with code today.