When we claim Code Valley’s Emergent Coding represents a new industrial revolution in software technology — a true watershed development for the field — we mean it. To illustrate its impact, let’s take a trip back to 1914.

A tale of two cars

Andreas, a thrill-seeking chap in Frankfurt, takes the fifty-mile trip in a bumpy carriage to Mannheim, arriving a whole day later to purchase a gorgeous gasoline-powered motorcar at Karl Benz’ factory. It costs 10,000 marks ($2500), breaks down once a week, and costs a fortune to maintain.

Over in downtown Detroit, Michigan, dashing mover and shaker Bill visits a showroom to check out the latest Model T, produced on Ford’s brand-new automated conveyor-belt assembly line. It costs ten times less at $250, is dirt cheap to fix, and is by far the most dependable automobile ever made.

The assembly line that rewards creativity

Ford’s business genius was in focusing his company’s engineering talent as much, if not more, on the manufacturing process itself as on the vehicles produced — like Elon Musk’s custom robots for Tesla Motors today.

Code Valley brings the assembly line to 21st-century software production in all its glory, spreading its benefits to the digital world — with compensation for highly skilled, entrepreneurial developers rather than low-skill factory workers. In addition, the Emergent Coding paradigm incorporates sophisticated customization options even more flexibly than those available to today’s car buyers, who are used to tailoring vehicles with the click of a mouse.

What makes the software development “emergent” is the secret to how Code Valley achieves this feat.

It’s robots all the way down

Utilizing the smallest, most generic components available — processors, gears, servos — suppliers create more specific components, out of which others produce still more specific ones, all the way to the suppliers who assemble the robots used to create a fully customized consumer end product: your shiny new auto.

Similarly, Emergent Coding spreads out engineering responsibilities among a distributed group of developers, participants in the Code Valley ecosystem. Some devs specialize in the lowest-level elements designed for bare metal, while others will work in the rarefied atmosphere of the most abstract layer, on which end users actually pull the levers to define their requirements.

The virtual assembly line that reconfigures on the fly

The way Code Valley allows theoretically infinite customization is the heart of the system: a virtual assembly line that, instead of having a central conveyor belt running down the middle, immediately configures itself anew for every “car” that is built.

How is that possible?

Translator for hire

That’s where those robots come in. Each one is designed to capture requirements from either a user (at the top layer) or from other robots, and translate them into a form the next layer of robots down can work with.

In the Code Valley ecosystem, we call these robots Agents. Each Agent — which was created and is fully owned and controlled by a participant like you — translates requirements recursively down the supply chain until the last, base layer of Agents does the final translation to binary code. At that point, the entire virtual assembly line collectively returns the final executable to the end user.

Show me the money

Now let’s fast-forward all the way to 2019. Bill’s great-granddaughter Charlotte currently spends $10,000 a year for a license to use business management software at her auto-detailing shop and wants something cheaper and more customizable. She loads up Code Valley’s auto retail service software Agent in her browser and defines the requirements for her billing, orders, and scheduling systems using its clear, simple UI.

Charlotte is informed that it’ll cost $62 in bitcoin and take 51 minutes to build; she gladly shoots some coin over and clicks the “build” button. An hour later, she’s running her new, custom auto detailing executable — no installation or license needed.

A few months later, Charlotte realizes she’s missing out on a lot of business from Bitcoin users. So she returns to her saved requirements in Code Valley and adds the Bitcoin support customization option, seeing that this time it’ll cost her $74 worth of bitcoin and take 57 minutes. The new billing and accounting systems are now completely integrated with Bitcoin at Charlotte’s Auto Detailer.

Emergent Coding will make customizing software for end users this cheap and easy. But what’s in it for the devs?

Just think about where that bitcoin Charlotte paid is going — the top-level retail-service Agent took a fraction and paid the rest to the Agents it depends on. Those Agents each took a fraction and paid the rest to their Agent suppliers, and so on. Each Agent is owned outright by a developer who receives bitcoin every single time it’s used in a temporary assembly line. Rather than being contracted over time to work on (and maintain) a project like coders today, developers in the Code Valley ecosystem get paid every time an end user triggers a software build with their Agents.

No time like the present

Although the easy-to-use end-user-facing layers of abstraction in Code Valley have not yet been built — it can’t cater to Charlotte quite yet — the path is clear. With every new Agent created by a developer, we all move closer to that world and its boundless demand for custom software.

Just imagine how competition of Tesla’s manufacturing robot components — and therefore high quality and low price — would skyrocket even more if each supplier was incentivized with a payment every time a car was produced using that hardware.

That is the effect Code Valley will have on software production, through the magic of Emergent Coding’s instantly reconfigurable assembly line.

Take it for a spin — build a small program with already deployed Agents here.

Create and deploy Agents of your own by requesting an invite here.