MeshThink

You never know a line of code will be the last one you write, at the time.

As I moved from engineering roles into product roles, I was excited to get more involved in product design and user research. I didn’t think much about leaving coding behind.

Within 2 years, I wasn’t fluent in the latest technologies my engineering teams were using. Within 5, almost my entire technical skillset was obsolete!

I tried to get back into it occasionally, but it was a big uphill battle. Examples might be out of date, the best packages to use might be tribal knowledge. The “World” was well greeted for the number of times I found a new way to say, “Hello.” I couldn’t get over the hump.

There’s been a lot said about generative AI’s ability to replace developers. Some predict a new wave of fully generative engineering, Star Trek-style. Just tell the holodeck what you want, and watch it appear! Others claim that they take longer debugging generated code than it would take to just write it from scratch themselves.

For our best engineers, the latter makes a lot of sense. But for someone like me, generative AI was a game-changer. It cut my ramp-up curve on new technologies by a factor of 10, maybe more. As long as I come in with a solid idea of what algorithm I want to implement, generative AI can get me the rest of the way there. I know the right architecture for what I want to build, I’m just missing the syntax and API specs. Generative AI was really good for this problem.

And for those senior engineers reading this – don’t sleep on GitHub Copilot or similar offerings. Yeah, it’s not ‘GitHub Autopilot’ – you still have to put the right structure together, and you still need to read everything it generates and check that it’s what you intended. But I think it’s worth the price of admission simply to never again scroll to ask, ‘wait, did I name that variable pushFlag or setFlag’? 9 out of 10 times, it saves me an API doc lookup as well.

So do I think generative AI replaces developers? Not yet – it’s still important to have a real live human who knows the code inside and out be responsible for it. Can it make every developer more productive? I say yes.

You see, what I went through being a decade-plus out-of-date happens all the time, in tiny increments, to every developer throughout their career. So if your engineering org isn’t already exploring how to best make use of this new generation of tools, start today – and say “Goodbye, Hello World.” 
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