RE:CZ

It is now January 28, 2026, 4:00 AM.

4:00 AM again. My sleep schedule has drifted back to European time.

I chatted with GB the day before yesterday and yesterday about AI. He seems anxious about the possibility of front-end development jobs disappearing.

He believes programmers will become unemployed due to the impact of AI. I think this view is somewhat one-sided. Unemployment is the result of supply exceeding demand in the talent market. The emergence of AI will indeed increase the supply side, but the conclusion that programmers will become unemployed is based on the assumption that the demand side remains unchanged. If the demand side also increases, then unemployment won't happen. So, where might the remaining demand come from?

Future Growth Points for Software Demand

I believe the following trends exist:

1. Increased demand for personalization. Due to a significant increase in productivity, products that previously could only meet mass-market needs can now cater to personalized demands. For example, AI can help users customize personalized websites, applications, etc. This demand is vast and diverse, far exceeding the scope of traditional front-end development. Demand serving small groups or niche markets will increase substantially.

2. The trend towards decentralization. Data sovereignty returns to the user. This is a key shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Users want to control their own data and expect applications to respect and protect their data privacy. This will inevitably give rise to new product forms, reconstructing all existing applications. This form is already happening extensively in the blockchain world, and similar trends exist in collaborative document tools. Currently, the decentralized world still lacks a crucial component: the traffic distribution system of the traditional internet. Traffic in the decentralized world remains a series of isolated islands. Whoever connects these islands will fulfill the traffic distribution function of the traditional internet, thereby dealing a fatal blow to traditional internet giants. From advertisers (Google) and social networks (Facebook, X) to content platforms (YouTube, TikTok) and e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Taobao), all are beneficiaries of traffic distribution. A traffic distribution system¹ for the decentralized world will be a huge market demand. Moreover, decentralization means borderlessness, meaning a global market that cannot be severed by politics, which is far larger than any single national market.

3. The trend of everything becoming programmable. The virtual digital world (cloud, social networks, media, finance, etc.) goes without saying; it will move towards an increasingly open state. Traditional physical devices (IoT), furniture, cars, industry, cities, etc., will all be digitized, intelligentized, and made programmable. Future front-end development will not be limited to web and mobile applications but will expand to various physical devices and environments. Users will want to control and manage these devices through visual interfaces. There are also new fields, such as biological programming, VR/AR/MR, brain-computer interfaces, etc. These fields will require new development technologies and tools to achieve user interaction and experience.

The Future is an Era of Taste

For individuals, improving personal taste and influence will be the most important things in the future world.

People cannot fully agree with or completely understand each other. Respecting everyone's differences is a fundamental, overarching judgment. However, each person is not so utterly unique and different. In many dimensions, people are similar. Taste is precisely an important method for humans to identify their kind. Taste is a complex cognitive structure encompassing understanding and perception of aesthetics, culture, values, and more. A person's taste often reflects their inner cultivation and aesthetic sensibility.

A person cannot pretend to be someone else because they can easily be seen through by others. One can only become a better, purer version of themselves and represent their own kind to voice opinions or create products to serve that kind of people. If AI's productivity greatly increases and barriers to entry drastically lower in the future, you can expect everyone to have the ability to have AI create a product to serve others. Then, any taste pretending to be that of another group will pale in comparison in front of the genuine group, failing to gain their recognition. Therefore, one can only be purely themselves, improve their own taste; only this kind of taste can gain recognition from like-minded people and establish a foothold in the future world.

In the future, a vulgar person must be thoroughly vulgar to gain recognition from as many people as possible; an elegant person must be purely elegant to find their appreciative audience. The vulgar take the route of a large audience but low unit price, while the elegant take the route of a small audience but high unit price. It remains to be seen which can generate greater returns.

In recent years, internet products have been converging in development because the benefits driven by traffic distribution have led to product homogenization. In the future, with the emergence of decentralized traffic distribution systems, product development will return to being driven by taste. Different groups with different tastes will have different product forms to meet their unique needs.

Take me, for example. As someone who pursues efficient, concise, and elegant product forms, I would like minimalist-style applications that focus on user experience and functionality. Others might prefer gorgeous, complex, and diverse product forms that emphasize visual effects and entertainment. Future products will be more diverse, catering to the needs of people with different tastes.