Just what the world needs, another software engineer pontificating about AI!
Nothing too deep here, just some things I’ve been mulling over that aren’t worth writing whole posts about…
Are we all really going to be staff engineers? It seems like there are a lot of people (or companies?) pushing the idea that the future of software engineering is making design decisions and directing and correcting a bunch of agents to get the work done. This sounds a lot like what some staff engineers do. What does a junior staff engineer even look like? It seems like this whole idea relies on people being good at clear communication and multitasking (two things that are very easy to screw up).
I hate that everything requires a subscription. If coding with a state of the art LLM becomes the default, it means that by default coding will involve paying a monthly subscription. While companies will probably provide this for employees, there’s now a perceived cost barrier for just wanting to build something on your own. It feels like model providers are hoping LLMs just become another utility that everybody needs to exist.
There’s a difference between wanting something made and wanting to make something. Coding agents are fantastic for getting something to exist. I have absolutely used them to take on coding projects that I just didn’t want to bother with. One of my favorite LLM uses at work with handling the boiler plate around new tests. It would be silly to say that AI isn’t useful for making things exist. But sometimes you want to make things and doing that with heavy agent usage just feels kind of hollow. The feeling of accomplishment that you get from building something yourself is real and there’s a cost to losing it. Sometimes I just need a table so I just buy one from Ikea, but that’s a different experience than using a piece of furniture that you designed and built yourself.
AI can be really useful for learning, but you have to choose to use it for learning rather than just getting stuff done. Before you could get an agent to just build something for you, you had to get your hands dirty building it yourself. This often required either learning something new up front or incidentally learning something along the way. Now you have to consciously decide you’re going to learn (which AI can help with!) in addition to shipping.
We haven’t seen AI products really enshitify yet. That’s not going to be fun…