May 25, 2025
The Growth of Human Guided Software
Honestly, I think that it’s obviously true that 90+% of software will be written by LLMs in relatively short order. But I don’t think it means humans will “write less code.”
Even if you put aside the ambiguity about what “AI-written code” means versus “human-written code” i.e. what exactly are we counting here? Lines of code in a higher-level language? Does copying and pasting count? How should we factor in contributions from pre-LLM autocomplete tools, compilers, minifiers, etc.?
I think the surface area of human-guided software, the actual volume of human instructions and parameters, will keep increasing. Even if human-guided code drops to something like 0.1%, the sheer scale of software built by AI would make that tiny fraction translate into more configuration and instruction than we’ve ever handled.
There’s precedent for this. Historically, computing itself has consistently moved in this direction. Each wave of automation, from compilers to cloud infrastructure and developer tools, has abstracted complexity away.
Yet, this doesn’t reduce the amount of things we tell computers to do. It always expands what we attempt, build, and manage.