Oh wow. How has it been over 3 years since I last posted? So much for my new year’s resolution in '23 to write one post per month! I’m at least 36 posts behind now. This is almost embarrassing.
I guess with all the 'on the job' writing I have been doing, my writing itch got scratched enough. But another reason for me to not like it as much anymore is that I started using ChatGPT to help me write. Turns out that when there is no challenge, I tend to lose interest. The absolute tsunami of stolen content writers pass off as their own on blogs and in articles also certainly did not help.
How I use AI
So before we dive into the actual subject, I want to start explaining first that I do use AI more or less daily in my work. Also to make it clear I’m not "against" AI; it has been a tremendous boost to my productivity and (more importantly) motivation since it is actually good at doing a lot of the "boring stuff". Scaffolding the plumbing for a new service, writing some mappers, Terraform code or writing the service documentation I’ve written dozens of times before.
The boost Claude Code gives to my productivity is hard to put in perspective. In some areas, it can be well beyond 10X. It’s much easier and faster to spin up an experiment to learn what direction we should take. If one does not work, I can instantly pivot to another.
I use it extensively when writing architecture documentation or a technical analysis of a problem we need to tackle. It can search broader and faster than any human can. Between now and a year ago, the improvements made to these models have been mind-blowing. A year ago I would spend a lot of time having to correct these models. Now they are challenging me.
With the bottleneck of writing code gone, my focus has shifted to making decisions. What technology choices to make, what other solution directions to explore, and what functionality to prioritize. In many cases suddenly "buy versus build" has a completely different balance.
What worries me
It’s not all pink ponies and pretty fairies though. We are at a moment in time where the impact of technology will be enormous. There will be a lot of positives, but there are also dangers. How we work will change, especially in office jobs.
AI is here to stay. So how is it going to impact us in the long term? When people go "all in" on not actually understanding code, who will be making the decisions? What happens when Google decides it wants to force you to use a new language they designed? What if Anthropic decides those datacenters aren’t going to pay for themselves?
The first obvious major issue that seems to be completely overlooked by CTOs in general is that you’re handing your keys to your IT kingdom to some very American and very capitalistic companies. Companies that are currently investing billions into hard- and software at a massive loss, that need to make up for that loss in the coming years. Once the dust has settled in who wins the AI wars, that debt needs to be settled too. If a company is all in on AI, what is preventing these companies from massively raising prices? I fully expect these companies to ask for 10.000 dollars or more per seat per year to recoup the costs.
Another issue that I already see happening is that junior developers are getting completely stuck. Not stuck at problems only, but also stuck in their personal development. There is already an issue with junior developers raised in the iPhone age not really understanding how computers work, since they were not exposed to the nasty internals we had to deal with. Moving around drivers and utilities in your autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get a game to start was hell, but it absolutely started us on a path of understanding the internals. Modern closed systems don’t even have a hood you can peek under.
And now with AI being the "norm" and companies actively pushing developers to rely on it, I see them getting stuck. I have had multiple people reach out to me the past year that were going around in circles. They didn’t even try to solve the underlying problem. "I have this exception and Copilot doesn’t know" was all I got. And mind you, some of these developers were "senior" software engineers.
With juniors especially the pressure to perform as fast as their peers is massive. For them it’s almost impossible to explain to a product owner that they take 3 times as long moving a ticket in Jira from left to right because they want to actually understand what they’re doing.
And this is where we, the "very senior" engineers, need to step up. We need to be guiding other engineers, shield them from pressure, so they can actually grow to a level where hopefully eventually they will be able to replace us.
What’s next?
So to conclude this, I’m going to do the fun stuff myself. Because I enjoy doing the fun things, but also to keep challenging myself. With Claude specifically, getting hands-on experience with technology has become much easier since it handles all the boring plumbing for me.
I am not going to pressure myself into trying to keep a certain pace in blog posts, but I do intend to write more. And I also intend to just write about things that I enjoy writing about, even if it’s of less interest than my typical "How to do X in Java". And I guess we will always need people to create new things that those AI companies can then take and profit off of!
So here it is! This is a Certified 100% AI-Free blog post! I wrote all of it myself, Claude just reviewed it, flagged spelling errors, gave some nice suggestions on tone and flow, and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up in the end!