The IKEA Effect in Software Development
I was reading a newsletter today from Sahil Bloom and he was introducing the IKEA Effect. This is how he described it:
Welcome to The IKEA Effect.
In 2011, behavioral scientists Michael Norton, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Mochon coined the term IKEA Effect to refer to a cognitive bias where people place significantly more value on things they put effort into creating.
The researchers cited the example of the legendary Betty Crocker food brand, which saw sales of a new “just add water” line of cake mixes flop in the 1950s. Evidently, the process was too easy, which meant consumers felt disconnected from the process and valued the output less than before. When the recipe was adjusted to require adding an egg — a tiny bit of incremental effort — sales skyrocketed.
Trying To Make Life Easy
Upon reading this I immediately thought of the current state of Software Development. Recently the term ‘Vibe Coding’ has been coined and has been generating a hell of a buzz in the Software world. An easy way to generate lots and lots of code. Major generative AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are doing all they can to make Software Developers’ lives easier and easier releasing model after model and tool after tool.
There seems to be a whole motivation towards making everyone’s life ‘easier’. This is a successful short term strategy as it plays on humans natural tendency to lean into the ‘easy’ way of doing something. However, over the long term according to this study it’s not a good idea as humans will tend away from the easy path… Eventually.
At the moment, it seems that the approach to create AI tools that assist developers rather than replace them is the winning approach. However, if these assistance get too useful, then developers will just stop using them as they will just get bored.
Easy Makes Life Lose Meaning
What I found interesting about the IKEA Effect is it showed that humans need hard things in their lives in order to create meaning and keep themselves interested.
If Software Development becomes too easy thanks to AI, developers will just lose interest and move onto something else. I have already seem the way developers are jumping on these AI tools and adding complexity to it to make it ‘better’.
This short video from John Lanquist shows how he is adding things to an existing project in Cursor to make the AI faster and more accurate. There have been attempts at creating prompt languages as human written language is just too imprecise for using AI to build out computer programs. (Who would have thought!!)
It just shows though that people will naturally tend to the complex over time. They just seem to be following nature’s example.
Software Developers Need Challenges
Software developers are drawn to programming for many reasons but one of the main reasons is the challenge. At a fundamental level programming is problem solving. Yes there is code involved plus layers and layers of best practices, different languages, architecture etc but ultimately Software developers want to solve problems.
Up until now this has been hard. However, many of the ‘hard’ aspects such as algorithms, using suitable data structures and choosing the best approach can now be handed over to AI to solve. What does this leave us with?
It’s not clear to me at this time, especially as the landscape is shifting so rapidly at the moment. I think its easy to say software developers will become more like ‘architects’ that tell AI agents what to do and what to produce and then fine tune it. But for me this will quickly leave the average developer bored so not a long term possibility.
Will software developers be pushed more and more into niche areas? Will they mainly work on innovative things that AI doesn’t have any records of yet or maybe forced to work on legacy code that so far has been tricky for AI to handle. Let’s see.
Conclusion
The future of software development is murky at best right now but one thing is clear, if the art of software development becomes too easy the best engineers will migrate elsewhere.
From the IKEA effect, its proven that people want a certain amount of challenge in their life and up until now, many people have sought that challenge out in their working lives.
AI companies that are currently ‘winning’ the race will have to tread carefully or they may become victims of their own success. They may make their tools so good that people just end up not using them. There are already plenty of developers switching off these AI tools or limiting their impact on their lives as they are finding them too useful.
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