Grief, Growth, and my Future as a Programmer | jorj.tech

Grief, Growth, and my Future as a Programmer

As AI transforms software development, this is my honest account of moving from fear and resistance to adaptation and the mindset shifts I’m making to stay relevant and fulfilled.

Whether or not I want them to, things are changing. I started writing code when I was around 11 or 12 years old simply<br>because it excited me. I thought the process of writing some text and it performing some useful function or coming to life<br>visually within my browser was fascinating. I had grown up at the right time for this to be accessible too - information was<br>free and it was everywhere (W3Schools, YouTube, Codecademy, etc).

The process of taking an idea, breaking it apart into abstract concepts, figuring out how to translate those concepts into<br>code, and then actually writing that code was something that I took pride in and helped give me purpose. I think everyone<br>can agree that its a fundamental desire of a human to feel like they posses a unique skill that can contribute back to society<br>in a meaningful way. Coding was this for me. More than that - it was fun. I&rsquo;ve always enjoyed being a student and continuously<br>learning. Software development was, and still is, changing rapidly and it was fun to attempt to keep up in the places you<br>could. Once coding moved from a hobby into my full time job, this is one of the things that kept it exciting for me.

I vaguely remember OpenAI releasing GPT-3 to the general public sometime in late 2021. A few of my co-workers had already<br>been following developments in the LLM space and were excited about the release. One of them showed me a few things GPT-3 was<br>able to do, and I thought it was pretty neat. In my head I was thinking if this improves enough these could make for cool chat<br>bots or a semi-intelligent autocomplete. I don&rsquo;t know if I was already in denial at that moment, or if I genuinely though that.

Since that release we&rsquo;ve obviously seen a lot change. We&rsquo;ve seen LLMs get much more intelligent, LLMs with a more focused scope<br>of expertise, actual products get built, autonomous agents created, new processes developed (and old ones retrofitted) to<br>allow for collaboration between agents, and finally we&rsquo;ve seen some pretty inspirational work done through all of these new<br>tools both with and without humans directly in the loop. We&rsquo;ve definitely gone way past the point of chat bots and<br>semi-intelligent auto-complete. I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;m alone when I say that I&rsquo;ve experienced a wide range of emotions over the last<br>year or so as this all has unfolded.

Being completely honest, I&rsquo;ve mostly experienced sadness, anger, denial, and fear about all of this. I love programming. It&rsquo;s<br>something I&rsquo;ve loved doing and it has been a major part of my life for nearly 15 years now. I always told people I was so lucky<br>that I happened to find something that I genuinely enjoy that I get to do as my job. I intentionally stuck my head in the sand<br>for probably far too long about using AI. I didn&rsquo;t think there was any way it could do my job better than I could, apart from<br>helping me with boilerplate tasks or maybe writing some tests that I didn&rsquo;t want to expend energy on. We&rsquo;re officially at the<br>point where I can no longer look away though.

Before I get into the actual part of this blog that I was wanting to write, I think it&rsquo;s necessary for me to talk about that<br>last emotion I wrote in the previous paragraph: fear. I think a lot of us are feeling this right now for various reasons. We<br>have all spent incredible amounts of time and energy pouring into ourselves to make us better at our jobs. Now we&rsquo;ve been<br>confronted with a black box that can intake requirements and output software that fulfills those requirements. It sucks. I<br>really don&rsquo;t have any inspirational things to say here other than you&rsquo;re not alone in feeling this way and we&rsquo;ll get through<br>it together.

So, what I actually wanted to write about was how I am changing my approach to software engineering both inside and outside of<br>the workplace due to what AI, LLMs, agents, fleets, etc. have enabled in development. Let&rsquo;s get into that now:

My New Rules

To preface this section, these are some of the mindset shifts I really want to make as we move into this new paradigm. I think<br>they&rsquo;ll play roles in both helping me come to terms with the change as well as set me apart in the future.

1. Embrace Change

I&rsquo;ve been hiding behind my own emotions for too long when it comes to all of this. Whether or not I want it to happen, it is<br>happening. I can either fully get onboard with it, or the train is going to leave without me. I&rsquo;m at peace knowing that I would<br>rather continue to be in this industry in any capacity than exit it (or get pushed out). In addition to that, there is a lot to be<br>genuinely excited about as it...