Ever since the release of GPT-3 by OpenAI, I have been an advocate for using AI tools, from coding assistants like Copilot, Cursor, and Perplexity.

LLMs are amazing and have improved my productivity and engineering related work, from researching new topics and concepts. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. Being on X, there seems to be a new AI tool every week. Cursor is one of the prime examples. It has gained an unfathomable amount of shilling. Cursor is great, but it’s nowhere close to replacing an engineer. Once you start building something complex with a backend, you’ll realize that you will spend more time debugging the code than writing it.

The whole “AI is going to replace engineers” thing is all a fugazi for now. You still have time to become a software engineer. Maybe in another 7 years it will and only the best engineers will be prominent. The last job that will probably be replaced is engineers. It’s definitely going to be harder due to the best engineers using AI as well to help them compared to you just starting out but it definitely is doable. Just work harder.

Have you ever thought about why this whole AI trend is happening and why it’s so trendy in the news saying that it is going to do all these things and replace YOU. Well, there is some truth to that if you don’t innovate your skills.

Another side to the coin is that AI companies need investments to do research and train their compute. How do VCs know what to invest in and have their ROI? They invest in companies that have perceived future value and the growth potential than what it is currently. Influence enough people and you will get your perceived future value. They get more money to innovate and grow. It’s a marketing tactic in itself. Have the tech elites pay the news companies and influencers to say good things about their product, more people will believe in it and invest. Don’t believe everything you read on the news. It’s all some political marketing agenda.

The vast amount of technical debt will come from being a “prompt engineer” on your work instead of actually being a software engineer. Even an 8 year old can be a prompt engineer and build something simple. It’s no different than someone giving the 8 year old a question from a Math Olympiad problem, solving it and then saying, “OH MY GOD AN 8 YEAR OLD CAN SOLVE A MATH OLYMPIAD PROBLEM!” There is a significant difference between understanding how something actually works and just copying and pasting things while hoping they work.

The only source of knowledge is experience.”

— “Albert Einstein

Technical debt with AI is applicable to every field. Nowadays, a huge percentage of college kids are doing their assignments and projects with AI. I am actually more worried that upcoming doctors are using AI and not understanding what they’re learning. Eventually, you will have to pay the price for your technical debt with work you don’t understand, and not even AI can solve it for you because it is too complex. Remember that AI is trained on data and not anything new.

It’s a double-edged sword. You get to ship things faster, but you might not know how it fully works. Once you build a huge complex system and something breaks down, you won’t even know what is causing the error because you’re just a copy and paster. Then you will have to pay the price of technical debt. I have been able to fix complex bugs faster without using AI. Most of the time when I ask AI to fix a bug, another bug appears. It’s better to just take it into your own hands at that point.

I love writing code and to some extent, using Coding Assistants has taken some of the joy out of it. I also remember more when I write it myself. You can’t keep the training wheels on forever. I also want to do the combo moves on vim, I want to feel like I’m the one making the moves and not the machine doing it for me.

It’s more fun to be competent”

— “DHH

DHH might be right. Promise land might not even exist where AI will do all these things. We cannot guarantee the future.

Never the less, I am not an AI decel. I am rooting for the AI acceleration movement and everyone that is behind it. It looks very promising and there is a bunch of smart and bright people that are working on it that I fully believe that they will make a change. It has drastically changed my life, added tons of value and I am way more productive than without it. Automate the boring stuff and leave more time for things that matter.