Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
A variant of this comment on HN is something I've heard too often:
I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart...I find it way less fun to be waiting around for agents to do stuff and it's way harder to get into flow state managing multiple of these things. It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales
Yeah, it sucks that a skill we all had has been commoditized. You always heard stories about factory workers getting their jobs outsourced or automated, but we (incorrectly) thought that this would happen to white-collar jobs like software engineers. In hindsight, this was quite naive but now that we're here, we have no choice but to deal with it and just embrace it like a helpless man on a beach staring at an incoming tsunami. Ride the wave or drown.
And yes, we all have job loss anxiety, especially those of us who don't have FT jobs but contract their way around, but I want to acknowledge just how relieved of actual work stress I have been because of AI. Simply put, no upcoming feature request scares me because I know I have help. Have to look at a legacy codebase and make a change? No problem, I can understand the codebase 50x faster than I could have before. A customer requested a major change that requires a bunch of refactoring? Child's play. I want to parse through a bunch of logs to find a needle in a haystack? Done. Need to create a plan for a double-entry accounting system and I'm not even familiar with accounting concepts? Bring it on. Code has poor documentation and you're procrastinating? Not any more. You get the idea.
All these things used to stress me because the research, investigation or learning curve for these things was steep and time-consuming. Some of the curves may still be steep, but it certainly isn't time consuming anymore, and that in itself has improved my quality of life. The amount of time AI has freed up for me to simply read a book, or watch a TV show, or spend more time with family is significant. My weekends used to be swamped with jumpcomedy.com work and I actually went for a bike ride because I know something that would take me 20 hours will take me 4, and I actually have the option to take up leisure time. This is wild to me.
Do I miss writing code from scratch? I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that I don't miss getting stuck even though getting stuck is how I learned many things. I do know that I like seeing my ideas come to life faster - in minutes and hours instead of weeks and months. This means I get to experiment more, so maybe I've replaced "getting stuck learning" with "experimental learning". The number of iterations has increased and so did their speed so I'm going through the inspect-and-adapt loop many more times than before. It's the Lean Startup cycle on overdrive.
But again, do I miss writing code from scratch? Gun to my head. I'd say...no. That sounds like a betrayal of my art and profession, but code was always a means to an end, and I seem to be getting to the end a lot faster, so what am I feeling sad about? Is it nostalgia? Is it letting go of something you invested in for so long? Is it that writing code was part of your identity? Is it that learning how to code feels like a sunk cost? Are my degrees all for naught? No, yes, a little bit, maybe.
What matters now is that we have arrived in an entirely new world and I have some skills that meet the moment. It turns out that the core principles of software engineering have little to do with syntax and language, and the skills that I now use most aren't too different than pre-AI, but seem to be more valuable because AI seems to work against some of these, some examples:
- Problem decomposition, i.e., breaking a larger problem into manageable parts and then focusing on each one intentionally without bloating your problem/context space
- A dedication to the YAGNI/KISS principles because it's so easy to generate code with AI and implement things you might not need
- Finding the right application architecture and abstractions because you know your customer's needs better than AI and are better at anticipating change, because you talk to customers
- Greater focus on the business problem rather than the "how" which is what code is. I find myself knowing more about the problem domain than before.
These aren't necessarily hard engineering skills but they are engineering skills which I've elevated to be my "primary" skills, replacing writing code. I feel some nostalgia, but I also see results faster which more than makes up for it. Is this going to eventually result in my unemployment and loss of income? Maybe. But the future is worry and the past is regrets, so may s well just live in the moment.