As software developers, we find ourselves in a curious situation at a certain point in our careers: we discover our inability to talk to our clients, let alone understand what they are saying.
This happens whether we work as independent developers or as part of a development team. In the latter case, there are managers and leaders instead of clients. I’ll refer to both cases as “clients” in this article for simplicity.
It’s curious because it doesn’t feel this way until we get it.
I started my career in development twenty-six years ago. The world back then was way different from what it is today, but I think the same thing is happening today: everything goes so fast that we don’t stop to listen to what's happening around us.
There’s this pressure to learn more, learn fast, and do more.
We fail to learn this critical skill at the beginning because, no matter what we do, we have to do it faster. There are many people behind us competing for the same job, opportunity, or project. But it could also be because programming feels intoxicating, and sometimes it goes to our heads, and we stop listening.
Eventually, this idea sinks in: to do a better job and keep moving forward, you need to learn to listen to your clients and understand their requirements. This is monumental for your future success because most of the time, our clients do not know how to express their problems or ideas.
So you learn how they speak, what terms they use, what’s important, what’s not, and so on.
You mimic the clients, understand their problems, and, more importantly, you talk back in a way that makes them feel reassured that you are perfect for this job and that everything is going to be ok.
You find ways to extract the information needed for the job. Learn how to ask, how to speak, and how to detect when something is missing.
You become the perfect interrogator.
I was reading a comment on my previous article, and this idea hit me hard. I realized that these days, with all this AI mumbo jumbo, our tables are turned. Now it is we who do not know how to express our problems and ideas to these AI agents.
We are at another inflection point in our careers where we need to add another skill to our repertoire. It’s imperative to learn to convey our thoughts to the AI agent of our choosing.
So you need to learn how to write (or speak) a prompt, what terms to use, what’s important, what’s not, and so on.
You will find ways to provide key information that the AI needs to produce a good result without burning all your tokens in the process.
You’ll learn how to ask, how to explain, and fill the void so nothing important is missing.
You will become the perfect subject for the AI agents.
I found this shockingly interesting.
What do you think about this?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article here on the site expressing my feelings about AI agents and how fast and confusing it is getting all of this. I’m truly grateful for all the comments. They helped me realize that there’s more to AI, and that I shouldn't quit. I need to keep experimenting and learn how to integrate them into my pipeline.
If you haven’t read it, here’s the link to the article. It’s called “I feel lost on AI”.
Top comments (3)
This hit home. We're so focused on building' that we forget we re actually solving human problems. The real skill isn't writing perfect code it's understanding what the client actually needs, even when they don't know how to say it.
It takes time to master the skill, but it's one of the best to have. Easily overlooked, but very rewarding.
Yeah man you're right - don't "quit", just keep at it ... for me the interesting (and somewhat encouraging) thing about AI is that it can be used for so much more than just generating code (which is what gets by far the most attention) ...
P.S. talking to customers and being able to analyze their requirements is worth gold!