What’s complex now?
AI didn’t just speed up software work. It scrambled our sense of what should be difficult.
Until recently, we had a pretty good sense of what was difficult.
A senior expert could get the job done faster, but the baseline was mostly the same.
A complex feature took time. A straightforward one took less.
With AI, that baseline is completely out of whack.
I’ve watched features that would have taken a day or more be completed and ready to deploy within ten minutes.
I’ve also watched seemingly straightforward tasks confuse AI so much that I spent longer iterating than expected.
That’s where people get it twisted.
They see the heavy lifting become lightweight and assume all software work has been simplified by a factor of ten.
But AI hasn’t made everything ten times easier. It has made the difficulty much harder to predict.
“Complex” can now be quick.
“Simple” can still become a rabbit hole.
So don’t just ask “Is this complex?”
Ask: “Where is the complexity going to show up?”
Building something with AI and unsure where the complexity might show up?
Reply and tell me what you’re working on. Happy to think it through!