Advancements in technology open up new avenues of opportunity, allowing many to achieve what was once the preserve of a specialised few.
This should however come with a caveat: just because technology enables you to do something, doesn't mean you should.
Before the modern Content Management System (CMS), publishing to the web was a technical endeavour.
Many early websites were built with hand-crafted HTML, and while applications such as MS Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and database-driven platforms that with PHP and Classic ASP front ends later reduced the need to code every single page, you still required a significant degree of technical knowledge to publish.
The advent of CMS, and later Enterprise CMS, opened up content creation, allowing anyone with basic IT skills to edit and add content, and over the following years we saw the consequence: a proliferation of truly awful websites.
In some cases, these were vast digital estates containing tens of thousands of pages, authored by hundreds of people with little to no understanding of the disciplines of content design.
In a previous role I was given the remit of managing that organisation's website with a view to improving its content and functionality.
After a review, my team concluded that the content, published by professionals in their field through a well intentioned but devolved model using an enterprise CMS, was simply beyond salvaging, and the most effective way to improve the website was not to review and rewrite the multitude of pages, but to start again.
I saw this pattern emerge again with the advent of another new technology.
The introduction of low-code form builders transformed the creation of digital services. As with web pages, no longer did you need a developer to hand-code your online offering, and by simply dragging and dropping elements a functioning form could be built in minutes.
But, much like the CMS revolution, this empowerment enabled some organisations to quickly and easily create some truly unusable forms, often built by people with little grasp of user experience (UX) or digital accessibility.
And now, I see the potential for history to repeat itself again with application development.
The emergence of “vibe coding” allows the creation of software simply by describing how it should work to a generative AI platform. The application is then generated by the platform and the parallels to my previous examples are striking.
If used wisely it can be a powerful creative tool particularly for prototyping, but without the guardrails of sound engineering practice it also risks producing code that lacks the discipline, security, and scalability required for sustainable systems.
Just as effective content requires an understanding of style and grammar, and the creation of good forms requires knowledge of usability and accessibility, creating quality software demands a foundational knowledge of secure and robust engineering practices.
This is not to say that AI isn’t a profoundly useful tool when used as part of the whole software development process, it is.
Initiatives such as
the Government Digital Service drive to promote the use of AI coding assistants will undoubtedly save developers immense amounts of time. The crucial distinction is this promotes using AI as an assistant to help the professional, not as a replacement for the expertise they bring.
Across these three examples the lesson remains the same: empowerment without governance and expertise often leads to poor outcomes, just ask your content and service designers, and the principle endures: just because advancements in technology mean you can, doesn't mean you should.
