Software brain, AI backlash, databases, and automation by Nilay Patel on Decoder:
I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops — software. Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world.
Nilay's framing here is uncomfortably precise. I build developer tools for a living. I am defined by and rewarded for having software brain and assuming people share my particular kind of bias. As a developer and product manager on the front lines of translating reality into code, I see the gaps every day where that translation quietly fails.
At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It's just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around.
I hear from two kinds of developers: those who want us to keep tweaking the database, convinced every problem is in fact a training problem, and those who feel the drift from reality widening beneath them as we roll more and more AI into our products.
You can't advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how everyday people are living their lives.
No amount of marketing will close this gap because it isn't a marketing problem. It's a worldview problem. Those of us building products are quietly praying for the technology to become invisible before the gap between the database and reality becomes permanent.