Is Citizen Development Dead?
Since ChatGPT released almost four years ago (Nov 2022) we have heard that programming skills are obsolete. In February 2024 Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said “Nobody needs to program anymore. AI handles it. Programming language is human now. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.” As someone with a Computer Science degree and owner of a development based services company, people frequently ask me, is your job obsolete now? And if programming itself is already trivial, where does that leave citizen development tools like Google’s AppSheet?
A big part of my current role is to be aware of market forces. I have to make sure that my developers are training on the right tools to ensure our longevity. We have to be leading edge to make sure that we are competitive.
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Another important part of my job is to make sure that the work we do for our clients is Secure, Stable, Scalable, and Reliable. The tools we use have to have proven track records.
There is a constant tension between these two needs and recently AI has been right at the center of this. So when CEOs are saying that nobody needs to program anymore, I get skeptical pretty fast. Over the last few years, I have seen some really impressive demos. I have seen people without any programming experience make some fun personal sites or POCs. But I have not seen a lot of proven value from deployed tools. I see reports like this one from MIT say that only 5% of custom enterprise production, and I think this is a key to the question will AI trivialize citizen development? AI still does not solve the age old saying, “well it works on my machine”. When you do not know what hosting entails, how do you get your cool new tool in the hands of your coworkers or clients? AI has raised the floor of what is possible without any experience, but it has not lowered the ceiling of what can be done with expertise.
When you have an employee builds an AI tool, an IT team will still need to ensure that it hits the four pillars I referenced above. Is it Secure, is Stable, is it Scalable, is it Reliable? Integrating these tools to existing data sources while preserving governance is crucial, and AI does not open this up for people outside of IT. But Citizen Development tools can alleviate this bottleneck. Tools like AppSheet allow IT teams to control information citizen developers can use and how they can (easily) deploy them. AI still cannot safely propagate an AI developed solution across your enterprise, but we don’t want to lose out on the crucial expertise that your employees have.
Yes, I do think that AI will forever change how we approach programming and citizen development. I am not pretending like nothing will change (though I do want to avoid sounding like Elon Musk saying that fully autonomous cars are two years away every year since 2015). We are developing internal AI training, but we aren’t sunsetting our traditional development training. We are helping our developers use AI more effectively, but we also recognize that it is going to take a long time for AI to catch up to the governance needs of the enterprise.
Much like how the internet and .com boom have fundamentally shifted our lives, AI is going to change how we do the work we do. But in the same way that brick and mortar stores still exist, and how interactions on the internet will never be able to fully replace face to face interactions, programming and citizen development will be around for a long time.
