Tomorrow evening I will be giving a talk on the “Future of Code” at the NASDAQ Startup CTO Summit. The amount of code in the world has been growing exponentially for years. And that means that when you are in 2026 looking back, something like 75% or more of all code will have been written in the last ten years. In the future, code will be everywhere, from your toothbrush to your car, and everything will be powered by code, from your daily reading to which company selects you for a project. And that changes the questions we need to ask.
We still need to ask: Will our code work? As in, will we build systems on time and on budget that have relatively few bugs? We have some answers to this question, such as agile development methods, using quality tools such as Code Climate, etc.
We also need to ask: Will our code be secure? And that’s already a much tougher question. There are too many dependencies to count and systems are vulnerable on many different levels including social engineering. Nonetheless here too we have at least partial answer.
Increasingly we all have to ask: Will our code help? And by that I loosely mean, will our code make the world a better place? Because with code everywhere and powering everything, code will determine many more outcomes than ever before. Who sees what ad? Who gets which job? And we don’t have good answers to this as we are barely learning to ask the right questions. One of those happens to be who gets to control the code that runs on our devices (and manages our lives). For this question we don’t have any good answers yet. But pointing out the questions is a starting point.
And finally, most importantly, we must ask: Who will control code (and data)? Will it be a few large commercial entities that are increasingly consolidating into just a few players? Or will there be lots of room for decentralized innovation? With blockchains and app tokens we have the beginnings of an answer.
I will be the last speaker of the day and am hoping that as CTOs leave the conference they will think about how much responsibility comes with their great power.
