from Luddites to AI: the Overton Window of disruption

I've been thinking about Overton Windows lately, but not of the political variety.

You see, the Overton window can be adapted to model disruptive innovation by framing the acceptance of novel technologies, business models, or ideas within a market or society. So I've been pondering about where, when and how AI can be framed.

Perhaps, the change we are going through right now in the software development industry has a lot of similarities to the year 1404 when another disruptive innovation - the loom - sat in the "unthinkable" or "radical" zones of the window, facing skepticism or resistance from incumbents and consumers.

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids.

Luddite - Wikipedia

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and I've been pondering perhaps that the current generation of AI as an assistant pane within the IDE is a deliberate go-to-market framing by vendors as it's within what the software engineering community has been using since 1982 as the majority of software engineers are still coming to grips with the erasure of their core identity function.

As innovators advocate, demonstrate value, or leverage external triggers (e.g., economic shifts), these ideas which were once unthinkable or radical gradually shift toward "acceptable" and "sensible" within the window.

There are now seven major players in the space producing AI enabled developer tooling but the frame is changing fast - two months ago Claude Code was the only non-IDE primitive but as of last week Amp is now generally available as a command line primitive (as well as a Visual Studio Code Extension).

When Claude Code came out, I didn't quite understand why it even existed as it seemed like a marketing gimmick but now I do. Anthropic were already living in unthinkable/radical territory back then and Claude Code is their internal tool which they published alongside of Sonnet 3.7 to nudge the Overton window.

Since then, I've been pretty busy with pushing boundaries and applying all of the knowledge shared on this blog. The resulting outcome can be seen in this livestream where a supervisor is managing four headless agents, building software from specs whilst I was sleep...

Everything is changing, fast. Both in the industry and at work - last week I departed Canva and joined Sourcegraph to help nudge the Overton window.

but as I'm about to head down for sleep, I can't help but notice another Overton window...

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