I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.

In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.

The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.

History shows Gates and Allen were right and commercial software was necessary for the growth of personal computing. Most people did not want to write programs to make PCs useful, but they were willing to buy spreadsheet and word processor programs that did so.

What was lost in the turnover the programming of computers to third parties is making the programs that do exactly what one wants. Have you ever used an app and wished it had that one feature that would make it so much better? You can submit the idea as a suggestion to the developer but whether it ever gets incorporated completely depends on the developer. More likely your idea will never become part of the app.

Of course, if you wrote the app then you could simply add the idea yourself and it would be done as fast as you can do the programming. My experience with working with Claude Code to write my Personal Assistant app reminds me of the beginning of personal computing as I have described.

Since the 1970s college degrees and an entire profession of creating computer software came in to existence. The profession has grown so large that it exists in nearly ever single corporation around the world. In many ways automobile manufacturers, banks, insurance companies, and more are software companies that just happen to make cars, save and transact money, and provide financial protection for catastrophic events.

Right now I see most of the reaction to the latest incredible developments with artificial intelligence coming from the computer software profession because AI is the profession’s disruptor. Ironic given how the profession has been a disruptor of so many other professions.

AI like Claude Code can and will replace people who have computer science degrees. I personally think that humans should know and understand all of the programs sold to and used by corporations, particularly ones that are critical to life and a functioning society, but I fear that the sheer quantity of code that can be produced by AI will quickly outrun the pace at which humans can understand it.

I do think that AI will have a positive affect on how people use personal computers for their own needs. Dare I say it might even put the “personal” back in to personal computing?

The Personal Assistant app that Claude Code as developed for me meets my needs perfectly because I have specified every function it provides. Claude has done all of the programming using Python, Flask, and SQL Lite. I don’t know if Claude has written the best, most efficient app and I don’t even know whether the tools it has used are the right ones, but they work. I know Python well enough to read it and I understand from past training and experience the fundamental concepts Claude has employed, but I don’t know if I could debug the code it has written. Is this bad?

I don’t yet know whether this AI is a good or bad thing. Like the Internet before it, this new AI technology has tremendous potential for good and bad, just like we humans. I think better self awareness and liberal arts education would better equip us in resisting the bad and maximizing the good. In the mean time, I can’t help but chuckle over how the greatest advancement in computer software to date enables us to go backwards in time if we choose.