Certified Shovelware
Some people have called into question whether AI coding agents are actually increasing developer productivity. It even led one person to ask, "Where's the shovelware?" in a widely circulated blog post. I responded that I was doing my part and pointed to a tool which was written by a coding agent—and something I wouldn't have created otherwise.
Because I keep running into people in apparent disbelief that coding agents can do Real Programming, I decided to wear it loud and proud by creating a GitHub badge for all my projects that wouldn't have existed without coding agents as Certified Shovelware:
What constitutes a shovelware project? Ask yourself these three questions:
- Does it actually work, fulfilling its intended purpose?
- Was the code predominantly written by an AI coding agent?
- Would the project not exist otherwise because of the time or expertise required?
If you answered Yes to all three, congratulations—you created some certified shovelware!
Feel free to copy this Markdown snippet and paste it at the top of your shovel-ready project's README:
[](https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/)
By labeling real, useful software as having been created with the assistance of AI code generation tools, even skeptics* will eventually be forced to acknowledge their creative potential. Happy digging!
*It's perfectly okay to be mad about AI: the stolen training data, the disruption to the job market, the concentration of power and capital, the devaluation of programming as a craft. What's not okay is to gaslight developers who've experienced a tremendous boon to their productivity by claiming all AI tools are useless.