What an excellent article by a smart, humble, still-learning person!
Favorite quote:" There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...]
I’m constantly reminded as I work with these tools how hard the thing that we do is. Producing software is a ferociously difficult thing to do. And you could give me all of the AI tools in the world and what we’re trying to achieve here is still really difficult. [...]"
What do you do if you don't have that existing experience? How do you build it up?
Build it up in your free time. It's extraordinarily valuable to build up those skills, and I'm not convinced that companies will allow time to slow down and build them.
Break things, and then fix them. Repeat many times.
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it’s sad that i had to triple-read this to determine you weren’t being sarcastic. sad for whom? i don’t know. but the amplifier take is exactly the right one.
I kind of felt the same way reading the article! It felt so unusual to encounter someone who is both smart and humble and willing to admit they were learning. And I was happy to encounter it and sad that I was so surprised by it.