Eighth in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
Production lines that run twenty-four hours a day don’t stop for a deployment or a network outage, and I wrote software for them. AI writes a good sync routine, one I’d take as written on most systems, and all of it assumes you can turn the thing off.
The line was running before the software showed up, and it will be running through the next failure, so the software’s job is to keep up.
Seventh in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
AI turns a request into finished-looking code in an afternoon, and I take that trade every time. Nobody got any faster at checking that the code does what the business needed, so that is where the schedule goes now.
A stack of generated features that nobody has confirmed is a stack of guesses, and every one I add makes the confirming take longer.
Sixth in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
Ask AI why a production system is misbehaving and it will hand you twenty plausible causes in seconds. I’m glad to have that list. What it can’t do is cross any of them off, because the evidence is in the logs and on the plant floor, and that is where the work is.
“Only during summer” is worth more than a stack trace, because it rules out everything that doesn’t care what month it is.
Fifth in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era. The first four were about the developer and the profession, and this one opens the stretch on the work itself.
The work starts with a request, and the person making it is telling the truth about what hurts and guessing at the fix. I do the same thing when I write a vague prompt and take the first answer.
AI made producing the code cheap, and it did nothing for the part where somebody has to go and find out what the code is for.
Fourth in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
AI now does in five minutes the work I used to hand a junior developer, and I let it. But that work was how junior developers became senior ones, and a company that stops handing it out is spending down a supply it has no plan to replace.
You cannot hire ten years of experience if nobody was given the first year.
Third in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
AI writes a good share of the code I ship now, and I am not going back. But understanding a system used to arrive free, as a byproduct of building it, and teams that no longer do the typing are about to find out what that was worth.
If nobody ever learned the system, there is nothing to describe, and you are troubleshooting an application that no human has ever understood.
Second in a series of ruminations on the direction of development in the AI era.
AI made the extra feature, the extra option, and the extra test close to free to generate, and I have done exactly that. But cheap to create has never meant free to own, and somebody still gets the call when it breaks.
The typing used to be the brake, even if nobody thought of it that way. Now the typing is nearly free and the brake is removed.
This is the first of a series I plan to write of ruminations around the direction of development in the AI era.
I use AI tools every day and have no interest in going back. But there’s a line between using a powerful tool and being unable to function without it, and I think a lot of teams are about to find out where it is.
If you can’t explain the code without asking AI, you don’t really own that code, you’re just renting it.