1764: In the English county of Lancashire, a weaver named James Hargreaves built a device that could spin eight threads at once. He called it the Spinning Jenny.
Textile workers across England pushed back hard. In some instances they destroyed the new machines. They could see that the economics of their trade were changing, and they were right.
Within two generations, textile production had been transformed completely. The workers who resisted weren't unreasonable — change is disruptive and the costs fall unevenly. But the technology kept moving regardless.
The Spinning Jenny didn't eliminate work in textiles. It changed what that work looked like, and expanded the industry considerably.
Software development has reached its Spinny Jenny Moment.
AI-assisted coding isn't just a new tool to add to the stack. It's a meaningful shift in how software gets built — greater in scale to the move from assembly to high-level languages, or from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
If it feels like something significant is happening, that's because it is.
The parallels between the Spinning Jenny and AI for developers are worth taking seriously. In both cases, a new tool dramatically increased what a single worker could produce — and in both cases, the people who adapted earliest fared best.
- One machine multiplied one worker's output eightfold
- Cottage industry could not compete
- A new class of industrial worker was born
- The skill shifted from spinning to operating and designing
- England became the workshop of the world
- One engineer with AI rivals a team of five
- Solo practitioners can ship at company scale
- A new class of AI-fluent engineer is being born
- The skill shifts from writing to directing and designing
- The builders who adapt will define the next decade
AI coding tools are here to stay.
The Spinning Jenny wasn't a passing craze — it was a better way to make things. The same is true of AI-assisted development. Individual tools will come and go, but the underlying shift toward AI-augmented workflows is a durable change.
Avoiding these tools puts you at a practical disadvantage.
Lancashire's weavers had legitimate grievances, but the technology didn't slow down for them. Developers who skip AI assistance are doing more work to get the same output, while others move faster.
Knowing what to build matters more than ever.
The Industrial Revolution didn't make engineers less valuable — it made the ones who understood systems more valuable than those who only knew hand tools. With AI handling more of the routine coding, good judgement about architecture, product, and trade-offs becomes the real differentiator.
Small teams can now punch well above their weight.
The Spinning Jenny made it possible for fewer people to produce much more. AI has a similar effect on software teams. A small team with good AI workflows can ship at a pace that previously required a much larger headcount. That's a genuine opportunity for anyone building something.
Deep technical knowledge still matters — probably more.
A skilled weaver with a Spinning Jenny outproduced an unskilled one by a wide margin. The same principle applies here. AI amplifies what you already know. Strong fundamentals in systems design, architecture, and engineering judgement compound well in an AI-assisted workflow.
Getting comfortable with these tools now is worth the effort.
The developers who invested time early in cloud infrastructure, in open source, in modern frameworks — they built skills that have served them well. AI-assisted development is a similar bet. It's early enough that the learning curve is manageable, and late enough that the tools are genuinely useful day-to-day.
The Industrial Revolution was disruptive and uneven in its effects. But looking back, the direction of travel was clear fairly early on — and the people and organisations that recognised it did better than those that didn't.
The same is true here. AI for software developers isn't a magic solution, and it won't replace good engineering judgement. But it is a genuine productivity shift, and treating it as such is simply good sense.
The Spinning Jenny made it possible to produce far more cloth with the same effort. AI makes it possible to write, review, and ship far more software with the same team. That's a straightforward thing to take advantage of.
This isn't about hype. It's about noticing what's actually changed, and adjusting accordingly.
The tools are here. They work. The sensible move is to learn them well. What will you weave?