Josh,
I deeply respect the team, company and product you’ve built. From a technical standpoint, your team has deployed what is in my opinion a flexible business building tool without equal. When it comes to how you listen, treat and respond to your customers, I find your team to be among the best not just in the industry but overall.
I’m not embellishing - when the community spoke out against price hikes over the last few years, you guys could’ve just said “tough luck, that’s the price if you don’t like it you can leave.” But you didn’t do that, instead:
- the first time around, you allowed folks to retain cheaper grandfathered pricing and,
- this second time, you’ve notified the community well in advance and are taking months to gather feedback from us (I’ve personally been reached out to twice at this point).
So I genuinely trust that you guys will do your best to do the right thing when it comes to creating and rolling out a BubbleGPT of any form.
That said, I disagree with the conclusion that Bubble developer jobs in an AI dominated future will be just as plentiful and as well paying as they are now. The two intuitions supporting that idea are flawed or just obviously wrong - those being:
- AIs are useless without expert “drivers”, therefor existing experts will still be employed to drive those AIs.
- The explosion of No-code tech has not suppressed traditional programmer job demand so, similarly, AI won’t displace Bubble developers.
AIs do not need expert “drivers”
To the first point: the truth is experts need not apply. We’re not needed anymore. It’s that simple. Exhibit A: In his video ChatGPT changed how I work in After Effects FOREVER Jake in Motion explains:
I just used a brand new tool to get chat GPT to write me three actually useful After Effects scripts… Prior to this video I had absolutely zero experience with scripting in After Effects so this is absolutely something that you can do even if you’ve never touched scripting yourself
A minute later he cuts to a clip of another YouTuber saying:
Is this what a developer feels like?
There’s a million examples of this sort of “I don’t need an expert anymore” videos circulating so trying to sell anyone on the idea that expert “AI drivers” will still be needed is outrageous if not simply uninformed. And how about Exhibit B, back in 2019 I hired @vini_brito to build a plugin for me. Now, before I hired him, several developers quoted me a price to build it including @ZeroqodeTeam. Well guess what - I don’t need em anymore. I’m sorry Vinni, I know you know I love you but @keith just demonstrated how Bubble plugin developers just became too expensive for anyone to call. Bye-bye job.
This is fun right?
Oh but I release plugins for free because the marketing and good-will blossoms into real gigs that pay. Exhibit C @keith the last time you made a thing for me (which thank you again by the way) I ended up donating like $20 or $30 bucks to you. Real talk, the amount I donate towards “karmaware” drops fast when it’s understood the help came from a free to use AI rather than the effort of an intellectual.
No-code is still not taken seriously. AI is.
Citing the muted effect no-code has had on software developer demand as the harbinger of how AI will impact the bubble developer job market is awkward at best. The reason that demand for traditional software developers did not diminish since you started Bubble in 2012 is because most businesses still view no-code as a toy. I’ve built entire projects, written blog posts, and have made MVPs to convince some of my traditional programmer friends just to try Bubble. They wont do it. They refuse to use Bubble because “It’s a toy and only serious businesses are built with code”.
And I’m not just talking about legacy projects. I’ve been scoffed at in job interviews for suggesting the use of no-code in new projects.
I mean c’mon, you guys even put out this pdf to help entrepreneurs convince their investors it’s okay to build on Bubble.
No-code’s failure to steal traditional programmer jobs en masse is in no way representative of how AI is already threatening employment for folks everywhere. By now I’ve made my point - I don’t want my applications to be used in a way that diminish my income. Even if the effect of my unwilling and uncompensated contribution is 1/1 millionth of the final model, I don’t want it in there. New tech is always around the corner - I get it - but even the Luddites weren’t raging against a machine trained on their creativity. This is different and frankly it would cross the line for me.
I’m going back to working on my plugin now… it’s something I’ve been working on for months. Cheers to hoping GPT doesn’t cheapen it 