Chasing AI: Who needs software anyway?

A friend said to me the other day, “In the future, there won’t even be software. It’ll all be AI.”

Sounds crazy right?  Or is it?

It clicked for me today when I impulsively plugged an old USB GPS receiver into my laptop just to see if it worked.  I opened up minicom to see if it would get a fix, and quickly glazed over watching the stream of familiar but uninteresting log messages:

$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30
$GPGLL,,,,,,V,N*64
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPVTG,,,,,,,,,N*30
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30
$GPGLL,,,,,,V,N*64
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPVTG,,,,,,,,,N*30
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30
$GPGSV,1,1,01,24,,,28*74
$GPGLL,,,,,,V,N*64
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPVTG,,,,,,,,,N*30
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30
$GPGLL,,,,,,V,N*64
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPVTG,,,,,,,,,N*30
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30

Those familiar with the GPS NMEA protocol can squint their eyes at this and can infer:

1. It doesn’t have a GPS fix yet ($GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48 shows no latitude/longitude, just a bunch of empty comma-delimited fields)
2. It can see one satellite (the odd $GPGSV,1,1,01,24,,,28*74)

We have gpsd for this.  I don’t need to squint at this telemetry stream.  However a thought occurred to me: while I don’t have gpsd installed and ready to fire up on this GPS receiver, I do have a flexible AI agent I can throw at it.  It’s also quite possible that this GPS unit will never get a fix, so the event log of it finding specific satellites is interesting…

Claude wrote a bit of code to stream the contents of /dev/ttyACM0 to a log file on disk, and a Monitor process to provide updates back to the main agent loop.  It even detected the model of the GPS:

It then went from a stream of noisy events to something more useful.  It started to get events as it recognized more satellites:

This quickly was just noise.  I started asking it questions.  Will it ever get signal or is the placement just too bad?  How long do I need to wait on a cold start in a sub-optimal deployment environment like on my desk, below a monitor, indoors like I am trying right now?

While it monitored, I asked questions and it taught me things: GPS satellites move slowly across the sky, so flickering number of satellites in view is unlikely to be movement across the sky – it’s just weak signals.

Here’s the point: I wanted less noise and to wait I let it keep trying:

I reprogrammed my “GPS status application” – Claude Code – on the fly.

The GPS eventually found a third satellite and after a few more minutes it got a fix as I had hoped for:

Could I write my own GPSd?  Sure I could.  But that’s not the point – the point is that using an AI agent in-situ means you don’t have to write the software up-front.  You don’t always need requirements and a plan like you did before the AI era.  Software can even be ephemeral like today’s exercise – none of the code it used even hit disk.

One of my OpenClaw experiments is to use it to track grocery spending and prices over time.  However I’m refusing to write any code right now.  All I’m doing right now is capturing data (photos of receipts) over time.  I know I’ll want to ask questions like “has the cost per pound of beef gone up over the past three months?” – however my strategy for this is not to just optimize for the answers, but to see what questions the data set I’m reasonably able to collect can even answer.  Will my receipts prove useful?  I’m not going to code myself into a corner – instead I’m going to collect data and when we have enough, get the AI agent to build some analysis tools to try and answer my question.  Time will tell.

We all know AI agents can write great code, but we’re still stuck in the old way of thinking that the software is the hard part.

Next time you think you need software, ask yourself: can an AI agent just do this for me?