AI is rushing deep into the tech world. I’m jumping between astonishment and having an existential crisis, at least for some parts of what I’m doing.
I really love writing code, and doing it manually is a big part of it. It’s more than just a hobby for me: shaping ideas and bringing them to life by hand, creating something reusable (and sometimes useful), and sharing it with the world. From a young age, I had a deep curiosity and urge to understand how things work behind the scenes, fiddling and breaking them (security-wise) and using these learned concepts to create new stuff. My hobby became my job, and I still enjoy both sides.
Seeing new frontier models creating complete, good-looking applications with (kind of) clean and robust code brings mixed feelings. It’s astonishing as well as frightening. When using AI, I already experience how it multiplies my capabilities to turn ideas to code a lot faster. But it also reduces a part of software engineering that I really like: writing code. It’s a new balance I have to find between getting a feature done fast or doing it by hand, which is more fun. The resulting quality of both ways converges with every new model version. It’s a shift software engineers have to accept looking in the coming years. AI does multiply software engineering capabilities, and it’s up to everyone to find a good balance in their own workflow.
In the last year, I have integrated AI more and more into my workflows. It’s more execution mode now than experimentation mode.
I can’t ignore the problems this will bring: The software engineering world is getting harder for junior devs. Not because doing things is harder - it’s easier than ever, having a powerful assistant at hand every second. But it will get harder to build up experience and knowledge. Most things in tech I learned by doing them. Trial and error. Trying harder! It’s a concept I think is most fundamental to really learn, understand, and be able to apply knowledge. It will be a lot harder for junior and young people to do things the hard way if there is always the easy mode available.
For me personally, I have come up with how I want to have my AI engineering balance: Don’t offload all coding. Don’t offload all trial and error. Be responsible for every line (and action) generated by your instructions. And most importantly: Don’t offload thinking.