Three months ago, I was writing about hand-carving wooden surfboards, planting an orchard, and recreational coding for fun.
Railing against AI and firmly sticking my head in the sand. Fair enough, mindset shifts and change are hard.
Yet today, my AI work is moving with a momentum I can barely sustain.
I’ve used it to process data at scale, generate management reports, inform risk and compliance functions, support first-line support, help product owners with decision-making, aid developers and testers in doing their work, and do all this well.
Surprisingly, no one’s been laid off. Instead, this work is enabling organisations to move at a pace that’s been previously unthinkable. The competitive advantage is clear to all involved.
In a 100% backflip, particularly as a software engineer, I no longer see the case for having developers hand-code classes, methods, and algorithms. ‘Curly brace programming’, as Erik Meijer humorously coined, has already died. Those still doing it haven’t realised. Nor have the organisations still employing these folk.
Laboriously handwriting requirements is dead as well, as far as I’m concerned.
But I’m not sad, nor am I scared about this anymore. It’s just the next, truly amazing evolution in our tech careers, and I’m lucky enough to be around to see it.
I can analyse data without being a data scientist, write amazing code at pace, and draft boilerplate requirements in a fraction of a second. Leaving time to think about where the true value lies, and what I should painstakingly pick over myself.
I’m no longer a Business Analyst or Developer; I’m both.
It’s not vibe coding. It’s not blindly building what some machine said to make. It’s not ‘prompt engineering’ or checking in thousands of Cursor generated diffs. Nor are there Microsoft Co-Pilot stickers for your laptop lid.
It’s a much more fundamental shift. A dramatically reduced feedback loop between hypothesis, analysis, and prototype.
Much work still remains, and it’s there for the taking. Be like those folks selling picks and shovels during the gold rush. That’s where I’m headed, and it feels very good.