1764: In the English county of Lancashire, James Hargreaves built a device that could spin eight threads at once. He called it the Spinning Jenny.
Within two generations, textile production had been transformed completely. Not only how textiles were made changed but also who was doing the work.
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.
AI-assisted coding also puts software development in the hands of new people who would never have considered creating software. And it greatly accelerates the output of those who already know how to code.
In the last 60 years there have been three revolutions in computing. First came the personal computer putting computer power in the hands of everyone. Then came the Internet bringing those machines together and unleashing the power of sharing. And now AI make software development fast and available to pretty much anyone.
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.
Developers who skip AI assistance are doing more work to get the same output, while others move faster. Not only that but more people will become developers as the tools eliminate much of the arcana of computer languages.
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 what to build 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.
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 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?