Everyone reading this has probably not just already encountered AI, but adapted to it.
There’s just no getting around it: if you’ve been in Software Engineering over the past few years, you’ve seen your day-to-day change in serious, fundamental ways.
I have a close friend who just found a job after six months of unemployment. This person is a true “Rockstar” / 10-xer / whatever your preferred term is. He is an incredibly talented dev and architect that can cut entire new services from whole cloth.
And yet he confessed to me feeling a bit lost in his new position. It’s not just that he doesn’t write code anymore - he doesn’t review it either. From his description, the day-to-day coding of new features has been entirely abstracted away: it’s just code-writing bots talking to code-reviewing bots talking to code-deploying bots, all the way down. Humans only need to intervene periodically to calibrate the direction or solve some particularly intransigent bug.
My workplace isn’t this sophisticated - yet. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the education and medical industries, it might even be a while. But we’re absolutely on our way. And I’m convinced that he’s living in the future for not just Software Engineers, but all knowledge workers.
Software Engineers are panicking. They’re asking themselves hard questions about their role in rubber-stamping software created by AI, about what their profession still means in the light of AI coding supremacy. But the thing is, everyone should be freaking out. Not just software engineers and mathematicians, but therapists, nutritionists, healthcare providers of all stripes, lawyers, paralegals, financial advisors. Everyone who relies on their expertise and selling access to it is up for grabs in this new world.
I’m in a bubble, most of my friends are devs. But from the people I’ve spoken with, people who are bookkeepers or corporate communicators, I don’t think they understand the magnitude of what’s coming. Or even understand what’s already here.
We’re just not ready for what it means to have a full drop-in replacement for knowledge workers yet.
So if you’re a dev and you’ve adapted to this post-AI workflow, consider a thought for the legions of people who might soon find themselves redundant. And as you continue to adapt to your AI-enabled workflow, spare some time to think about people who will have even less recourse than most devs to “fight back” against the prevailing order of things. As a Software Engineer, I sometimes take solace in the fact that I can at least understand - maybe even implement! - my replacement. If you’re a designer or translator or a journalist, you might not have the same options.
In the end, AI is coming for all of us. Software Engineers are just first in line.
