Words by Vernacchia

It’s been quite a long-ass time since I posted here. Can’t believe my last post was back in 2024… A lot has happened since then. I’ve moved across an ocean, lead a team to deliver a KMP, Server Driven UI mobile application, and my company was acquired. Maybe I’ll post about those in the future, but for now, let’s get address the elephant in the room… AI.

I remember a couple years ago when my company held a GenAI hackathon. It was an interesting one, but the tooling and models were not what they are today, which led to, IMO, some cool projects, but not actually focused on the application of GenAI, rather using them inside ML areas or just customising a chatbot.

But, a lot has changed since then. AI Agents are a thing. Claude has gotten pretty good at generating code. Companies are fully bought it, whether it’s making them faster or not, or causing problems they can’t get in front of.

This really got me thinking in general. At first, I experienced Deep Blue and thought about the future, which looked bleak. I did wonder what I was going to do, as this AI stuff will replace me. I thought about how I don’t have many skills outside of my profession. So, how would I provide for my family? Tbh, this got me really down, and it was all I could think about for a while.

I needed to get out of this funk. So, I started to research things, helping me find a path forward.

First, I realised that I’m not the only one feeling this way. I’m not alone. I don’t like to relish in the fact that others feel pretty shit about things, but, in this case, it was nice to know I’m not alone.

Second, I watched some videos of experts in the field who had different takes from all doom and gloom. The one from Grady Booch is below.

He talks about how AI will enable the third golden age of softare engineering. How engineers will move up a level of abstraction, just like when higher order programming languages replaced writing Assembly by hand. It’s just another tool to solve problems. A tool we need to use and get used to being around. Fundamentals (system design) are still very important and what is needed in order to guide this next age of engineering.

He also makes the point that there will be so much software and that itself means there will be a need for engineers. I guess we can always clean up AI slop ha, until AI is cleaning up all its own slop.

Lastly, I realised there’s so many cool new things out there to try. There’s a lot of projects aiming to utilise AI to help people build stuff.

So, I got off my ass and started trying things… Turns out they’re useful, some more than others. I’m going to deliver a React Native application (link/post when I do) soon that used a lot of these tools. Things like GasTown, Ralph, Gemini CLI, Jules, etc… So we’ll explore those together.

As I continued to try them, I saw that there’s extrodinary value in learning how to use these tools as enablers. While they do have their shortcomings (many of them), they are worth it and can help!

I also have lots of other ideas where this will help me. Time is the limiting factor in my life, so maybe I’ll be able to get to those ideas I’ve put on the back burner.

While I’m a bit more excited for the future, we’ll see where it goes. At least I’m not dreading it. But, I’m a bit sad, as I’ll be missing the old way. The coding hands on will become a past time, which is what I liked and got good at. But, we’re ever evolving, so it’s time (to use these tools in a sane manner with guardrails).

Something stuck with me, which I’ll leave here for the end of this post.

Don’t outsource the thinking!

The human is still needed for thinking critically. Once you oursource that, we’re lost (think Idiocracy)

Until next time...