This reflection is based on a post by Chris Loy on the industrialization of software. And unlike me, he’s a professional coder. His post is about technical debt, maintenance, and the downsides of AI-generated software at scale. But I’m interested in the other end of what he’s describing—not professional software, but code as content at an individual level.

The broad thesis of his post is that for the longest time, software was craft. You needed serious skills and experience to write good software. But now, thanks to AI coding, software can be produced at an industrial scale.

For most of its history, software has been closer to craft than manufacture: costly, slow, and dominated by the need for skills and experience. AI coding is changing that, by making available paths of production which are cheaper, faster, and increasingly disconnected from the expertise of humans.

This led me to the thought that code is now essentially content. Think about what happened with the rise of blogging and social media platforms. The production of text increased significantly with each passing year of the internet. And now thanks to AI coding tools, pretty much anybody with amateurish coding ability is capable of building simple projects, simple tools, hobby websites and apps. Maybe a few people will build some billion-dollar startup, but that’s unlikely. Most of these AI-coded projects will probably not be maintained. Once the novelty wears off, most of this code will just be digital refuse. We’ll see mountains and mountains of digital landfill.

And it’s starting to happen. Code has indeed become content. On Twitter, thanks to the democratization of AI coding tools, for $20 a month people are now spinning up all sorts of weird and wacky things. Not all of them are useless. A lot of them are useless, but a lot of them are really fun and joyful. Imagine somebody who creates a wonderful and wacky personal website. Somebody who built their own expense tracking app because the traditional tools they rely on are shit. The person who built their own fitness tracker tailored to their unique personality. People are building personal assistants, summarization tools, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

Yes, there will be digital landfill. But I still think this is a net positive. When I started using AI coding tools and built my first real projects, one of my immediate thoughts was: this will be a golden age of side projects. And so far, it’s proving to be true. A cursory scroll on Twitter will expose you to some really amazing and wonderful things people are doing. A lot of these things are also phenomenally useful.

I hate the term “content”—it flattens everything creative into fungible units of engagement. But here’s the thing: code as content means code as self-expression, code as experimentation, code as play. So yes, code is now content. And for all the digital landfill we’ll create, I still think this is a golden age worth celebrating.