It’s been almost three years exactly since I recorded my “On Losing Our Jobs to AI” video on YouTube. I have had time to use the tooling and talk to a lot of people about the effect on our industry. This is a follow up.
In my career, there have been two types of developer: those who crave to understand how everything works; and those who don’t mind just following a pattern or code they found to get it to work. I don’t have a bias against either type of developer. And, I would say, that most organizations can benefit from both types of developers.
But, now that we’re in the Claude era (or whatever coding agent you’re using) - I think we have to judge our agents too. I’ve used Claude to convert projects, make prototypes and refactor quite a bit. And in that time, I’ve come to the conclusion that AI is that second type of developer.
AI, by and by, have built models based on other things it was fed. Whether that is to create songs, videos or code. It mimicks what we think we want. And that is fine. But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we think we can prompt our way to finished products. I think we’re seeing re-hiring of a lot of devs as someone has to own the code that Claude (et al.) create.
Is this different than what we’ve always done? I don’t think so. When we create a new project (e.g. npm init, dotnet new), we are asking some collective intelligence to start us off without having to build everything scratch. Prompt engineering is just that. I don’t believe in curating a prompt so far as it contains the entire spec for a solution. Instead, I want a prompt that will do the 80% case. That’s it. I own the code after that. You can’t maintain that code by asking Claude to find a specific bug and fix it unless you then understand what it gave you.
This 80% case is a tough one for me, honestly. I love creating the first 80% of a project; I get bored in the final 20% (which is why I’m an architect, trainer, and consultant instead of a day-to-day developer). I see the productivity benefit, but still see a bright future for most dev’s. It might affect the BootCamp developers which is a shame as they were promised a future that might not exist much longer.
What do you think?
