Shift in approach

I spent a lot of time until this year with this specific approach of having a problem or idea and using coding to solve it. First I spent a tremendous time going into google and eventually ChatGPT to help me slowly build out a solution to whatever I needed. I already had a shift in approach from the using google to provide me a massive amounts of websites such as StackOverflow, Github, etc, to creating a running dialog with ChatGPT to help provide me the relevant information to apply to whatever situation I needed. However, I had made an entirely new shift this year with using AI.

My focus has always been the approach of look into some issue first and then I’d be able to create the solution myself from all the information I find. My thought process shifted more into a higher level of thinking. I thought more about what problems I wanted to solve, the architecture I was expecting, and the potential issues I may come across.

What to do now?

AI is becoming the next step forward in software development. StackOverflow is gone and dead, websites that had been a huge library of information are disappearing as well. As a developer, it becomes increasingly important to consider how to use AI then as a tool. I had my own personal bias and fears of “AI is going to take our jobs since it can do all the work”, so this had blocked me from fully embracing AI in fear of it being what defines my work. Once, I saw how much more efficent and faster AI can be at tasks that involve coding such as creating tests and building out features, I knew I had no choice, but to use it instead of fighting against it.

I didn’t know what to do. I’ve spent all my time being the one who would directly build out websites and applications. I was the one who was spending all my time within VSCode or Intellij to copy and paste code from Github to my own needs. I was the one who was debugging my code using print statements and logs to handle issues that came up. I was the one who would ask others for help when I couldn’t solve some issue whether it was another person or later ChatGPT. It became a huge epiphany that instead of being the one who was building the house, I needed to be the one who would manage the builders.

Next steps

If I was becoming one who had to manage AI, then just feeding requests to it isn’t enough to solve the issues or create the solution I need. A lot of times I see online the sentiment that AI can’t do everything. I think the bigger issue is not the limitations of AI, but the prompts and information people are putting into it that causes the largest issues. I believe the next steps forwards are moving towards having a deeper understanding of system design. It is becoming an in-depth expect in a domain as opposed to a language or framework such as the financial sector, e-commerce, etc. It is having a large understanding of how tokens work, how claude code works, how agents and skills work.

It’s a new future, and I’m still trying to navigate it.