The other day, I wrote: "Why do we write? Almost everything we do is just a data (energy) transfer." Make a note of this, I’ll come back to this later.
To position yourself to capture the value of an ever-evolving landscape, you need to engage in bouts of deep thought, strategic planning, and questioning of your assumptions of the future. There is no single answer; everyone has their own variation of this and adjusts accordingly.
For me, that started with questioning what the next phase of our technological landscape will look like: how software will be built, how humans will interact with it, and what role AI will play in the dance between the screen and our thoughts. My three takes:
- AI is the translational layer between human and machine
- We must treat AI as a thought partner. A companion that exists with an alternative set of skills and opinions to our own
- AI will be better than humans at many tasks; humans will be better than AI at many tasks.
Where does the intersection of true collaborative work efficiency lie, and how do we get there?
I subscribe to the perspective that AI will cause a boom in software jobs. Just, not software jobs as we know them, or knew them. In recent years, software engineers have been evaluated on building with pre-existing languages, atop pre-existing operating systems, atop pre-existing kernels. This new "AI layer" will be no different. The role of the software engineer will not disappear; it will evolve. English is now a programming language. Designing reliable systems will no longer rely on the manual transfer of information from your mind to another language that then needs to be compiled into machine readable data. This process now relies on thought alone, and the implementation, albeit with human led systems and guardrails, will be abstracted away from expressing this keystroke by keystroke.
Software veterans might read this and scoff. They might argue understanding of the software and true expertise does not exist without understanding each individual part and process of how the code is organized. To them, I ask: would you like me to walk through hole-electron pair generation in the depletion region of the silicon before I trust my code to run my integer math, or are we only pretending depth matters when the person at the keyboard is forging a path you might not believe exists, because it has yet to be discovered? Then I say: By that logic, no one understands software until they can derive Boolean logic from semiconductor physics, which would disqualify most of those people making that argument.
If understanding how to write and build reliable software systems requires ‘true’ full-stack knowledge all the way down to its core, then either explain charge carrier behavior in the depletion region before you merge your next PR, or admit we all work on abstractions we do not fully derive.
Generating code is cheap, but implementing usable code touches on the most human quality that will continue to set us apart from AI: social interaction. This will keep AI from "replacing all of our jobsss, ahhhh!!!" but will make us more valuable in areas previously assumed to be worthless, many of which are still being proved out.
That is where the future value lies, that is what I want to capture, that is where I will position myself. In today’s market, roles that capture this value sit in the realm of a Forward Deployed Engineer; a role that leans heavily on social interaction and strategy, but also on technical understanding of how to build an AI system that can be useful to another individual or organization. It is a role where we do not build a piece of software and see where it lands, but rather start with a sharp pain point and build backwards to the solution. A unique and fully customized workflow. Dynamically tailored. Obsessively contextual. Ever evolving.
This week, I joined HappyRobot. They are not only aligned with this vision, but are actively building it. Unlocking and leaning on the desire of humans to connect, they are building the future software and data infrastructure that lets humans get back to being human. I am so happy to be a part of this journey, to join an incredible team and to start contributing to projects that are shaping the frontier of how AI is utilized in real domains.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. These were my real thoughts and words.
Keep Building,
Jennings
