Your Web Platforms and Software Will Soon Won’t Matter

Because of the quick advances of AI it is foreseeable in the near future that there will be a fast demise of current software and systems as we know it.  I have seen this already happening on a small scale.

Conjure with a Quick Prompt Whatever Your Business Needs

Very soon a company owner will simply need to prompt an AI to get exactly what they need to serve their organization’s immediate and near-future needs.  They won’t need to care about the tech stack, the language or even the database their solution uses under the hood!

Just prompting an AI to “Upgrade all of my WordPress and Drupal sites and conduct smoke tests prior to releasing to production.” is here, or fast approaching.  The reliance on certain “tech workers” spending time and salaries doing maintenance is reducing organization overhead as we speak.

A small business owner will simply need to prompt AI and what they need to achieve their goal will materialize.  They can prompt “I need a simple email campaign management system like MailChimp”  or “I need a system like Salesforce Marketing Cloud to manage sending company emails” and in moments, an entire system will spin up with an administrative login and a quick list of instructions on how to use it.

Annectodally just last week I was asked by my manager if I needed a license for a JetBrains IDE product called “PHP Storm”.  I told him our team didn’t need it any more, the standard IntelliJ IDE will do just fine.  AI, for better or worse in JetBrains’ case, will simply just fill in the gaps for that specialized knowledge of those systems built around PHP.  I do not see PHP Storm surviving much longer, it’s akin to a Home Depot opening beside the Mom and Pop hardware store, their traffic will suffer enough where they probably won’t be able to stay in business for much longer.

PHP Storm: One of Many Canaries

My prediction of the demise of PHP Storm is just a small example.  For those who work in the PHP space such as WordPress, Drupal, Laravel or Symfony, Storm was a worthwhile product that saved valuable developer time when dealing with all the different versions of these CMSs and frameworks.

The code hints, patterns, libraries and built-in boilerplate code saved time and cognitive resources so developers could focus on the more important things – like solving business problems and adding new useful features that helped propel the organization forward with real tangible results.

Due to the challenges we faced in the past of maintaining and upgrading the Drupal CMS especially, PHP Storm provided those rich features which saved our software and web developers time, frustration and headaches associated with those formidable Drupal upgrades.  Particularly the upgrades where we had to jump not just one or two major versions but even three, combined with the fact some of these Drupal sites inherited some complex custom modules and other code to boot.

Anyone faced with having to upgrade from Drupal 7 to 10 have probably also have worthy stories of the challenges and perplexing issues that they faced.  It wasn’t up to us to decide when or how a system would be upgraded as this was an antiquated site that was transferred to us and immediately threw up a slew of security vulnerabilities and other red flags that had to be addressed.

But what a difference a year makes!  These unique challenges a software team faces, things like challenging upgrades and other unpleasant maintenance tasks haven’t changed but the solutions certainly have.  AI has democratized and centralized how architects, engineers and developers research, learn and come up with solutions and has made the choice of an individual tool specific to one task an antiquated and unscalable approach now.