The Future of Production: 1 Human + 1 Set of Efficient Production Tools + 100 AI Models = Creating Any Product
[⚠️ Auto-translated by ChatGPT. Review pending.]
Developing an app independently is an interesting and fulfilling endeavor, but the productivity of a single individual has its limits. Independent developers need to leverage tools to accelerate the development process and avoid getting caught up in trivial tasks. This allows them to focus more on their creativity and imagination, concentrating their energy on the core functionality and user experience of the application.
In the field of software engineering, the use of efficient development and automation tools can be traced back to the 1980s. The advent of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) integrated code editors, compilers, and debuggers into a single application, eliminating the need for frequent tool switching and speeding up the development process. Today, driven by agile development and DevOps culture, UI component libraries, development frameworks, automated testing tools, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools continue to emerge, providing developers with more choices for different development needs. These tools help developers quickly establish the basic framework of an application, simplify the coding process, automate testing and deployment, and ultimately accelerate the development cycle and improve overall efficiency. For example, in web development, popular front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js offer reusable components and simplify DOM manipulation, enabling developers to build user interfaces more quickly. Similarly, UI component libraries like Bootstrap and Material-UI provide aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface elements, speeding up front-end development. In the field of back-end development, frameworks like Django (Python), Ruby on Rails (Ruby), and Express.js (Node.js) provide template engines, route management, database integration, and other functionalities, greatly simplifying the back-end development process.
Nowadays, with the emergence of AI products like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Midjourney, the efficiency of independent development can be further enhanced. Previously, when creating a unique and personalized app, you might have needed design materials such as default avatars, background images, and UI controls. You either had to painstakingly search for suitable materials in copyright-free image libraries or create them yourself or with the help of a designer. However, now you can hand over these requirements to AI models like Midjourney, which can generate the desired visual assets in bulk. In the past, you might have spent a significant amount of time writing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) code, but now Copilot speeds up these processes. You only need to write a few lines of comments, and it can assist in generating high-quality logical code. Even if you encounter bugs, you can rely on ChatGPT to quickly pinpoint the issues and provide step-by-step solutions. The widespread application of large AI models has brought a transformation to traditional no-code/low-code development approaches. In the past, these no-code/low-code development products were often criticized for their poor performance optimization and lack of flexibility. However, AI's involvement enables a more comprehensive understanding of developers' intentions, resulting in higher-quality code and providing more possibilities for customization.
With the iteration of development tools and the advancement of AI models, the cost of independent app development is becoming increasingly lower, leading to a rise in the number of individual developers. The future norm for app development may very well be the combination of a human developer, an efficient set of production tools, and multiple AI models. By judiciously utilizing existing tools and technologies and collaborating with AI models, developers can rapidly create high-quality applications and bring to life various ideas and concepts they have in mind.