When AI Lets You Build Exactly What You Want
Have ever watched South Park? Do you remember an episode called “The Entity”?
Mr Garrison gets mad with the airline industry and invents a revolutionary new mode of transport called the “IT” vehicle. From a purely functional standpoint, the invention is a masterpiece. It is incredibly fast, highly efficient, and solves the travel crisis.
There is just one problem. Mr Garrison designed the interface and controls entirely around his own, specific personal preferences. The vehicle works perfectly for him, but for most others, operating it is an uncomfortable experience.
Right now, the technology sector is churning out “IT” vehicles at a record pace. And we have the AI boom to thank for it.
### The Danger of Zero Friction
The proliferation of AI coding assistants and low-code builders has fundamentally changed how we create software. It is now incredibly easy for a single founder or operations director to spin up a bespoke application exactly how they want it.
If you are building a tool solely for your own personal use, this is fantastic. You can build an interface that maps perfectly to you.
But if you are building an internal tool for your wider team, or a customer-facing application, this zero-friction environment is risky.
### The Value of Pushback
In traditional software development, the process of building a tool involves a lot of friction. You have to explain your idea to an engineer, debate the interface with a designer, and test it with a user.
That friction is actually a feature, not a bug.
Having to justify your ideas to other humans sands down the rough edges. It kills the bad ideas and refines the good ones. It forces you to listen to other voices and find the best, most universally usable solution.
AI does not do this. An AI coding assistant will not tell you that your user journey makes no sense. It will not point out that the sales team will hate the new visualisations. It just executes your instructions flawlessly, blind spots included.
### Bespoke to the Business, Not the Founder
At High Digital, we are advocates for bespoke software, (unless there is a perfect fit SaaS). In most cases we advise building platforms that fit specific operations. But there is a massive difference between building a tool that is bespoke to the *business*, and a tool that is bespoke to the *founder*.
When you use AI to build in a silo, you stop working things out collaboratively. You end up with a highly efficient piece of software that makes perfect sense to the person who prompted it, but is, most likely, unusable by the people who actually have to log in every day.
AI is an incredible tool for writing code. But it is a terrible replacement for user empathy.
Before you deploy your next AI-generated internal tool, take a step back. Make sure you have not just built an “IT” vehicle.
Are your internal tools built for your users, or just for the person who bought them? Get in touch for a chat about building software that works for your team / customers.
