In a comment some weeks ago (link) i wrote about how it doesn't matter if you are using AI or not, or if you call yourself a vibe coder or a SWE. Over my years of working with code, I have seen passionate people who are excited and want the product to succeed, and people who have no interest in improving anything and promote enshittification. In my unpopular opinion, it all comes down to how much you care about the outcome and the quality of your work, and how curious you are to learn the whys.
In this post I want to dig into that second part: curiosity, or rather, the lack of it. Last year I felt so stuck, I didn't feel that I was learning anything or producing the results I want to. Even though I was shipping code (a lot of it), everything was feeling pointless. Everyone around me was so obsessed of automating everything, that learning and progressing as an engineer was an afterthought. Even though they were pushing us to use AI in a ridiculous degree, and our performance was almost certainly evaluated by token usage, they didn't offer any material, courses on how these systems really work, what are the optimal ways of using them and why we should care. Their thought process sounded more like "use-this-produce-money" and the magical answer to everything was "ask claude".
Buuuut...What it took me a long time to realise was that the only person that is responsible for my learning and the quality of my work, is me. I had slowly and steadily gave up trying, because everyone was telling me that I will be replaced. But nobody will come and save me, or implant knowledge in my head. It's on me whether I offload all my thought process to AI and don't care anymore, quote very confidently what claude answers me back or whether I doubt on the quality of my work and push for the best. Somehow this is how I started writing here again. My mantra is that if you can't explain it simple, you don't know it, so writing helped me identify my gaps and what really really interests me.
I see lately both in my friends, my professional circle and even on linkedin, that many people have mentally given up (generally, not only in SWE). The state of the world isn’t the best. We’re constantly hearing about AI replacing jobs, industries changing overnight, economic uncertainty, climate anxiety, wars, and about 147 other reasons to wonder what the hell we’re doing here and what is the point of anything.
When you’re constantly being told that whatever you’re learning might be automated tomorrow, I can understand why people stop investing to their skills or even to themselves. Why bother getting good at something if it might not matter in a few years (or months/weeks?). Why even bother look at the code when AI generates it, AI reviews it and AI documents it? Why even invest on learning how to code? And somewhere along these lines we lost everything that made this job interesting.
My question to you dear reader: Does it really matter if AI can do the skill/task/programming? The promise of these fancy tools was to automate the boring tasks and us the humans we will continue doing the interesting or difficult parts. Is that what we are really doing? Somewhere in this trip we started offloading the interesting or the difficult and kept the worst part of this job for us - managing a tool. I like solving problems, find where this little bug comes from, create a new feature. It's like little puzzles to me, that you play the detective and you need to find the culprit. I really enjoy solving these by myself. So who cares if they can be automated? The world won't stop about the half hour more I will take to do something without Claude whispering "Yes, you are right, i underestimated the scope". Not everything should be done in the name of automation and efficiency, sometimes we do stuff for the sake of enjoyment and curiosity.
So maybe it's a good time to re-invest to ourselves and start be curious again. Care about what we are doing, even if we don’t know whether that thing will still exist in a year. The time that we invest to ourselves and our skills are never wasted. You can learn a new programming language, try a non-tech hobby, learn how the electronics world works, try a new library, revisit old projects, or build something completely unrelated to our job. Maybe we get the inspiration or motivation we need from somewhere we weren’t expecting.
I don’t think the answer to uncertainty is to stop being curious because AI can do it anyway. Sometimes we learn because we want to expand our mind or simply because it's just fun.
So, thank you, for coming to my Ted talk and the optimistic message of the day for you is: Stay curious! ✌️
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This post was written by human(me!) and might have grammar errors.
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