A lighthouse standing on a rock in a dark sea

The usual objection to software written with AI is that maintenance costs will increase because nobody wants to, or is easily able to, maintain the software. The coder gets the glory while the operations team foots the bill. I think the opposite. AI will make software maintenance cheaper, not more expensive, if the software is built to last.

The bill

The bill is real, but it did not arrive with AI. Most of the cost of software is incurred after its release, and most of that cost comes from the ground shifting beneath the software. A new version of a framework is released and the old one stops receiving fixes. The language acquires a new syntax, and last year’s clean code fails because of this year’s toolchain updates. An app built on a web framework in 2020 needs a rewrite by 2023, whether or not an AI wrote a line of the code.

This is the argument for using Electron and React Native. Build one web page and ship it on every platform.

Languages that keep their promises

A few programming languages are different. Go has promised since 2012 that a program written for version 1 will build on every later release, and it has kept the promise. A Go program from a decade ago compiles today without a change. The standard library covers most of what an app needs, so an app often requires few dependencies.

That choice matters more when agents write the code. An agent is good at the chores of maintenance, such as porting a fix to every platform and running tests on each system. It is poorer at constant rewrites forced by changes to frameworks and dependencies. An unstable language or framework wastes the time of agents and people in equal measure.

The return of the native app

Electron and React Native won because one codebase was cheaper to maintain than three. The price is inflexible web pages in place of native windows and controls, and apps that are several hundred megabytes at a minimum.

Cheap maintenance weakens that case. One Go program holding the business logic, with native windows on each of macOS, Windows, Linux, Chromebooks and the BSDs, is now within reach of a single developer or small team. vero does that for example, from a single Mac.

With any luck, this is the native app’s second act.