I'm a curmudgeon but I'm not. I'm not old, but I'm not young. I'm advanced with technology, but I'm constantly outdated. I understand the future but I live in the past. I interact with AI but I live in vi. I'm advanced, but I'm also dumb as shit.
I'm an infrastructure engineer and here's my experience with AI over the past 6 months of working at an AI-focused company.
I need to set some context for this. I've been in software for 11+ years professionally, and I've been building things for as long as I can remember. It started with hardware, turned into MySpace, and eventually became shitty Java programs I used to do my chemistry calculations for my AP Chem class (my teacher hated me) which I leveraged for my first job after dropping out of college. I've dabbled in frontend, security, and APIs but I decided infrastructure is my happy place.
After ten years full-time I realized the light had stopped shining. I didn't care, I was writing bad code, I didn't want to learn and I had lost interest. This led to a long period of time which I called my sabbatical. 10 years of work for one year off, at the risk of losing context.
When I walked away from tech, new products were released on a daily basis, OpenAI was just starting to talk about AGI after their GPT-3 release, Copilot was brand new, and GitHub Actions were untrusted. People were generally scared of adopting new technologies for the first time since cable internet (honestly it felt like Y2K again).
During my time away, I learned new skills, became a better person and learned how to communicate more effectively. I opened a laptop maybe once a week and I didn't look at code.
The transition back to reality of being a software engineer was hard and unexpected. I stepped into the world of new tooling, AI at the forefront, and things having shifted in a way I couldn't start to process. I felt like I was 10 again and Samy had just found XSS with the MySpace worm. It was time to deep dive, and it was time to learn. Without any of my prior assumptions.
I joined a company at the forefront of AI. We use AI to guide our process, we use AI to build things, we use AI to plan. We're very cognizant of the downfalls here and everything is still approved by humans but the time savings are massive. For my own work, I throw ChatGPT at SQL queries, I throw Devin at config changes, and I use Cursor to help with bash scripts.
As a productive and tangible software engineer this is scary. This is horrifying. This created an existential crisis for me internally when rejoining the field. I was worried that my job was disappearing. After accepting the reality of things, I decided the better path forward was to figure out how to utilize the fire rather than being the caveman who was afraid of it. I took my time to understand LLMs, and how rather than some "genius intelligence", they are truly more of a tool that you need to guide. As I write this today, I think I'm safe to say it's like having an extremely well-educated 5-year-old. You can ask them questions, you can ask them to do simple tasks, but also they literally don't know how to put things in a mailbox.
It feels like we've entered a new age. In 20 years' time we will refer to this as the "AI Age".
For the nature of the world as a whole is altered by age. Everything must pass through successive phases. Nothing remains forever what it was.
