Well, let me start by saying I don’t like the title either. And that’s why I didn’t want to have titles in these quick notes, but links without some kind of title were too ugly for my taste… Anyway, good digressing start, Aarón. Well done!
I’ve been thinking about where the software developer role is going to end up. When talking about this my language gravitates inevitably to a separation on what software developer was before AI and what it is (or will become) after.
Up until now, I considered myself a good software engineer. I was never the fastest, but I really liked understanding things. I felt like I needed to understand things to a level that I considered enough to be able to do my job. This always meant, as I already said, I wasn’t the fastest. But once I understood things I could pretty confidently know what direction was best (or what the fix was, or what the better architecture would look like).
I always blamed my memory as to why it took me long to understand things. This is nothing new, I have always struggled memorising dates, references or formulas. So I always focused on finding what was really important and then slowly grow my thinking from there. Usually I got lost while doing so, and then I had to start almost from first principles again. I am not going to say if this is good or bad (I now see the benefits and inconveniences); I am just saying this is how I have always been.
Flash-forward to today, and the blooming of AI. In theory AI should allow me to overcome a few issues I constantly faced: memory and speed of processing/understanding. I can open a repository (or a book) and just ask the questions and get the answers. I take plenty of notes, so now I can also ask AI about what I did, or was discussed in this or that meeting. It can even find relationships in the plethora of notes I keep in my personal (private) wiki.
But the reality is that I am not feeling that improvement. And, if any, I am feeling deterioration. Deterioration because this time I used to invest in understanding things now feels even more painful and more difficult to justify. So I do less of it. Not a lot less, just less. And like a muscle it gets weaker.
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