AI is part of my work now, and honestly I have no idea where it takes me. I use it every day, but I don’t like the structures behind the big models. Who owns them, who earns from them, who pays for it all. I haven’t made peace with that, and I’m not sure I will.
A talk I watched recently, more on it below, gave me words for it: everything we once shared freely is what taught the machines. Now it comes back to us by the token. Knowledge that was given away shouldn’t stand in the way of the next generation of software engineers.
I also try to keep understanding what I build. Not reading what it wrote at all is something I try to avoid. But skimming is easy, and really focusing on it is hard sometimes. That’s where I catch myself. Understanding still matters to me.
I’ll keep updating this note as my thinking changes.
A funeral that cheered me up
What I miss most are the hours with headphones on, deep in flow, fighting with one bug or building one feature until it finally worked. I think that’s gone. It died, and I guess we have to accept it. Maybe it lives on as a hobby, or as exercise. Whether anyone still needs that exercise in this world, I’m not sure.
Then I watched Dave Kiss’s talk “Eulogy for the Software Engineer” from Resend Forward. He holds an actual funeral on stage for the old way of working. Headphones, a notebook and a keyboard go into the casket, but the name on the headstone is wrong: what died is the hard way of doing the job, not the engineer.
I went in expecting more doom and came out with a better feeling about all of it. What I loved was the coding, and that was never only the typing.