Practical and existential questions for IT Design and Development.I first asked myself this question for a bit of a laugh. This was at the dawn of 2023, during the rise of the LLM. Doomsayers and prophets alike said AI will allow us to produce so much more, so much more quickly.But I had to ask… so much more of what, and to what end? The answer is not superficial.This question has been at times haunting and at times obsessing me for years. Now that software can use software for us, what exactly was the point of us using it in the first place? AI will be a force multiplier, undoubtedly, but what is it multiplying? What is software for and what will it mean for the world when we have exponentially more of it?Here’s the first clue: producing does not equal productivity, not in the technical sense.I had a deeply unsettling hunch and needed to piece together my thoughts before I could...