"When I grow up I want to be a pilot"
"I want to be a teacher"
"I want to be a doctor"
You certainly remember what you wanted to be when you were younger - you know, when 1K got you decent groceries, Man U was a good team and when you swear that the world had more color (spoiler, it did not).
However it gets to a point where you have to actualise these dreams. Go to college, get a degree, get a job, pay tax and depending on your career, either love it, or want to crawl into a ball and cry every night (sending hugs to you, stranger). In the early 2010's, a quick internet search or conversation would tell stories of Software Engineers in the former category: Big bucks, top companies and the INSANE work benefits were some of the reasons a whole generation, myself included, decided to get into tech.
"Learn to Code" they said.....
Fast forward to current year, those same kids are all grown up, and a good number of them took the internet's advice and went into tech. By now I am sure you know how coding was pre-AI, but to recap it looked something like
Tutorial/Book => try alone => fail (miserably) => Google/research => Figure it out => Big Brain Moment
However, as we might now know, things are not the same. AI has replaced how we work and more crucially, how we learn. Uniquely I have a bit of a taste of both, having started to code at a young age. I was and still am not a guru by any means, but I know enough to know that I don't know enough. By the time I got into college, AI was good, and a lot of the small gains I made learning to code were eroded by my admitted overreliance on it. I thought I would be okay - after all, top CEO's and figures globally were saying that software engineering was dead (This deserves an article in itself honestly), and so I thought "why bother to continue learning how to do it myself"? I am sure I was not alone in thinking this.
Fast forward a few years and I get a temporary role as an SWE at Lido. Although it was for work experience, I was really thrilled because I would finally get to learn with live software, making real impact. The first month was nothing short of humbling - reviews, reviews reviews! I did what I was used to at that point, prompt for fixes for the reviews which led to...drumrolls...even more reviews! At that point, before I took any other task, I was forced to go back to basics, books, tutorials, practice, fail (sounds familiar?) and I realised something
"Wow this is tiring!"
But I also realised something else
"I forgot how fun this was!"
See, even before AI really shook things up, we had a problem. Just like a tv series, new updates and tools become exciting to those who are following along but to those who want to start from zero, it seems daunting. This becomes especially worse when there is no clear starting point, and you are expected to figure everything out yourself and still be good enough to be relevant in the market. In my humble opinion, AI has only exacerbated this problem and introduced a new variable - the illusion of progress. At some point even I thought I was building, moving fast, Engineering...this could not be further from the truth. What I, and many others like me , were doing is abstracting away knowledge, the one thing you CANNOT afford to do as a developer. I think at some point, between the tools, frameworks and now AI, we forgot what developers actually are - puzzle solvers, those who thrive in the gap of knowledge, and intended functionality.
This phenomenon is what inspired the title. For the learner, it almost feels like they are put in an already running circus. There's no time to practice, no one will give you the opportunity to keep failing as you get it right and a lot of times, there's no clear map of what to learn first. You're late even before you get to start.
So, what now?
Admittedly, I am also still learning, I understand there is a lot I still do not know. I won't pretend to have all the answers. As such, I am only going to write what I plan to do for myself. Work did eventually get easier and I could ship well - but there is a lot to learn and so as I write this, I dedicate my free time to practice - learn, try, build, fail...the ways of old. Understand that AI is here to stay, however it is the puzzle solvers, those who thrive on the aforementioned gaps who will be the winners.
One More Thing
A few weeks ago, I received a frankly brilliant piece of advice from the dev lead.
"AI has taken us back to basics - where we actually have to have formal knowledge of the domains we build in"
Think about it - how many builders know the finer details about banking? Compliance? Farming??
Now, I am not saying that one has to do two degrees or something, but I think we need to look a bit deeper, question how the system works - the human elements, the paperwork. Being cognizant of the computing is great, but through that conversation I learnt that the winners of this new age will be those who are fluent in the grammar of their respective domains
After all, the kid who wanted to be a pilot never just learned to fly - they had to learn how the sky works!
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