| I used to have things that I knew would improve my life as a Software Engineer: books, videos, learning algorithms, practicing data structures, attending meetings. Now all those things seem archaic and nonsense. You can prompt everything in seconds. What to look at now to be actual as a professional? How to be relevant in the next cycle? How to survive this storm? What options we have? |
Being able to properly break down and understand a problem so it can be explained to the LLM is still valuable and something I think a lot of people who can already do it take for granted. Someone showed me their prompt about a project they were working on yesterday and it made no sense at all.
Being able to translate a problem into a solution AI can implement is still useful. I haven’t found AI to be good at designing systems or coming up with solutions to problems. It will try, but it always seems really bad. Having a person there to use AI as a tool, to guide it to solve the problem in an effective way, seems like the real skill.
What these tools look like in 2 years will likely be very different than what we see today. The main thing I’ve been doing is increasing my savings rate, and lowering my fixed expenses, so I have a lot of flexibility if/when it’s time for a new job or career. I know that no matter what happens, that will be helpful. Debt and any expensive fixed lifestyle costs represent risk. The more I can derisk, by keeping those values low and savings/investment high, the better.