Apps are Butterflies.

I find it's important to constantly reset your frame of reference when it comes to technology. 

My teen daughter could not care less about Google Imagen or Midjourney. Her cohort will never venerate a unique artistic creation as much as I or my generation is conditioned to do. The eyeroll response to how amazing image gen is was a stinging reminder that if I'm going to keep solving effectively, I better keep up with the future.

Not my daughter, this is Bard's generation of an unimpressed teen.

Taking that example further, why bother with trademarks or copyright, when you're no longer protecting anything that holds differentiation for long. To paraphrase Professor Michael Whitbrock from the University of Auckland - perhaps it's time artists no longer got free rent on the summation of ideas and creation of new content. Why shouldn't it be accessible to everyone?

Still with me? 

Now step sideways into other complex creations - like a full-stack app. We're already generating code, UX experiences, simple apps on the fly, subroutines just in time. 

Why should the ability to code not be accessible to everyone? Apps won't be unique and special pets for much longer, taking the 'pets vs cattle' view of technology. Cattle doesn't really work that well in this analogy. Besides, apps are more varied and beautiful than most monoliths. 

What about butterflies?

Solutioning via declaration is growing in all domains, and creeping in from the edges in every direction. Generative AI is accelerating this, so much so that it will (again) arrive before we know it.

It's not the death of SWEs, just as Infra as Code (IaC) wasn't the death of platform engineering. What it did was create a larger need for capabilities around site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps. Those will continue to grow.

Another space that will grow is the need for application security tooling. Specifically tools that eliminate attack vectors at creation. If we think that existing processes will be sufficient as the number of apps created continues to grow in quantity and velocity, we are deluding ourselves.

There won't be time to treat them as pets, especially if the creators and users of them don't.

So what's next??