A Graybeard Dev's Guide to Coping With A.I.

As someone has seen a lot of tech trends come and go over my 20+ years in the field, I feel inspired to weigh in on my take on this trending question, and hopefully ground the discussion with actual hindsight, avoiding panic as well as dismissing it entirely.

There are lots of things that used to be hand-coded that aren't anymore. CRUD queries? ORM and scaffolding tools came in. Simple blog site? Wordpress cornered the market. Even on the hardware side, you need a server? AWS got you covered.

But somehow, we didn't end up working any less after these innovations. The needed expertise then just transferred from:

* People who handcoded queries -> people who write ORM code

* People who handcoded blog sites -> people who write Wordpress themes and plugins

* People who physically setup servers -> people who handle AWS

* People who washed clothes in a basin by hand -> people who can operate washing machines

Every company needs a way to stand out from their competitors. They can't do it by simply using the same tools their competition does. Since their competition will have a budget to innovate, they'll need that budget, too. So, even if Company A can continue on their current track with AI tools, Company B is going to add engineers to go beyond what Company A is doing. And since the nature of technology is to innovate, and the nature of all business is to compete, there can never be a scenario where everyone just adopts the same tools and rests on their laurels.

Learn how AI tools can help your velocity, and improve your code's reliability, readability, testability. Even ask it to explain chunks of code that are confusing! Push its limits, and use it to push your own. Because at the end of the day/sprint/PI/quarter or fiscal year, what will matter is how far YOU take it, not how far it goes by itself.