Future-of-Work

🤔 The thing about how much AI agents and tools have improved is that I’m finding myself in a weird spot. I’m always working. Even when I’m not working, I’m planning and brainstorming in Claude Projects so I can use the spec and plan files later in Claude Code. In a recent interview with The Pragmatic Engineer, Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp said his “new rule for building software: always have an agent running in the background doing something.” (link) ...

This came up in my feeds today. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until I can’t anymore: never before has there been a time where we needed to be more intentional about training and mentoring juniors than now. As much as I love and use it, my biggest worry with current AI tooling has always been that it takes the thinking and understanding away from you. This is different from previous coding tools. Many just obfuscated or abstracted concepts, others assisted with tedious tasks, but this time the tool does it all. And it’s making us lazy, and it’s making us less capable. Studies are starting to show this. ...

The words we choose matter. People have been calling me pedantic for a long time, but I’ve never seen the problem with that. Words have particular meanings. Even synonyms are just “similar”, not usually the same. Some time back I wrote a blog post about “Why You’re NOT an Engineer (also Why It [Probably] Doesn’t Matter)” The key point I made: there IS a difference between a coder, a programmer, a developer, and an engineer (although some people disagreed). ...

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned in tech is boundaries. When to set them, how to enforce them, and (occasionally) when to cross them. Learning this early in my career made it easier to apply later – like now, running my own business. If I don’t get paid when I don’t work, then I don’t work when I don’t get paid. Simple. But this isn’t just on my mind because I’m chasing overdue invoices (though, you know, that too). It started when I saw posts and articles about how 996 culture is gaining traction among startups and founders, especially in Silicon Valley. You know, the “work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week” grind. And this is despite most people knowing it’s unhealthy. Despite the constant complaints on social about burnout and not having a life outside work. ...

🤖 I love how every new LLM release triggers a wave of “AI is coming for your job!” posts, only for people to realize a few weeks later “oh, nope, sorry, not this yet” 😏 💡 While AI tools are certainly force multipliers for productivity, even with agents, they’re not replacing humans yet. Even the best apps I’ve generated with Bolt or Replit eventually need human intervention and fixing. 🎯 Hot take incoming: I find it amusing when people consider these simplistic example AI-generated “apps” as “real development”. Most modern webapps are already essentially just careful combinations of frameworks and styling, using existing tools that solve problems in generic ways. That’s not novel software development. ...

Today again, I was triggered. So here is a hastily written post about my thoughts. sigh 😔 I feel like every week there is new thing which my inbox spams me with. If it’s not AI taking our jobs, it’s some [insert new and shiny framework] which will render [insert current “industry standard”] useless, or it’s about how everyone will get let go because of the market correction and recession, or whatever, so many stupid things. ...

I originally started writing this post at the end of 2022 but never finished it. Originally titled “Why LowCode/NoCode both excites and terrifies me!”, with the buzz around ChatGPT over the last months, I decided to 1) finish the post, and 2) update it to include AI tools like CoPilot and ChatGPT. So here, finally, is the update. Also a little different to my usual style. I didn’t like it. ...