The end is near

Before we start, here is your content warning: this post is 100% written by my meatware. No AI has anything to say about what goes in it, they don’t get to see the post before it goes in production either. But also, in full transparency, I pay for my ChatGPT account with real money. And I enjoy using it a lot. For pretty much everything at this point.

With that out of the way, lets kick this thing off.

I’ve been making software on the daily basis for about 25 years now. I’m not the father of programming, but I’ve made and seen things. Lately, I’ve been leaning on AI tooling more and more, and at this point, given all the anti AI drama in the industry, I want to offer an opinion.

Software engineering industry right now is little bit like the woodworking industry when they invented electric power tools.

Yeah, I know. They say that success of articles that compare unrelated fields depend on the audience knowing very little about either of the fields. But, stick with me here for a second.

You see there used to be a huge thriving woodworking industry. Sure we used to have big machinery for cutting logs into timber, but everything else was done by hands. All the furniture, appliances, tools, musical instruments and what’s not was painstakingly made by cutting, chiseling, sanding and varnishing wood by hands.

Armies if woodworkers existed, guilds, shops, artists big and small. And there was a huge demand on their products too. So huge in fact that we didn’t have enough of the workers and good craftsmen were rare and rewarded handsomely.

And so to make things more efficient, to speed up the process we have created easily accessible power tools that could saw, chisel, sand and polish wood at super human speeds. Later on we even made almost fully automated factories to produce wooden furniture. And CAD software that would run circles around the artisan designers of the past.

Here is the question though. Did the old manual labor industry disappear? By the most parts yes. Did it advance the woodworking craft? 110% yes. The whole midcentury modern trend wouldn’t happen without the new tools. The scandinavian furniture designers wouldn’t happen. IKEA wouldn’t happen. Did woodworkers disappear? Not by any stretch of imagination, if anything modern woodworkers are head shoulders knees and toes above the old ones.

Moreover, innovation in the woodworking industry brought other ideas forward. Like composite materials, synthetics, polymers. We’re now making some amazing furniture no one could even dream about let alone make it out of wood . I for one enjoy the hell out of my Aeron chair.

Why stop here? Lets go further. Did it eliminate a whole class of completely mindless jobs? Absolutely! But, do you really think woodworkers of the past enjoyed spending hours sanding wood, breathing in the dust particles and then dying of alcoholism an lung cancer by 60?

Every single senior engineer I know laughed at some point at the joke that programming is like being sad for money. And it’s true, not everything about programming is actually as enjoyable as we want to think about it.

Writing HTML/CSS by hans an dealing with browsers madness? No thank you. Reading through your ugly code that you wrote 5 years ago while hangover after breakup with a girlfriend? God no. Combing through dozens of forum posts and google groups and discord channel history to find out how change one line of code because you forgot to document it; while being hangover myself? Noooo… thank you.

Do you see where I’m going with this? I’m a staff level engineer, I know how stuff works (see what i did there?). And I’ll be honest with you, I have no patience for dumpster diving to move my projects forward. And that’s what AI is fantastic at. Giving me the gist, help me to grasp ideas and decisions so i could spend time on things that actually matter.

Can i figure out how to unpack 12 bit encoded integer data sent over a serial bus in C that works on this particular microcontroller? Yes I can, and I might even actually enjoy it now an then. But, I’d rather ask AI to write me a perfectly crafted function for it. It’s like in woodworking: can I make a tenon by hands with chisels? Yes I can, but if i use a jig and a router I can get that tenon done faster and with better quality and precision.

And I believe that’s true not just for these privileged to bragging about their staff+ level. I believe AI tools will help juniors too. Do you know how much senior engineer RTFM crap juniors have to go through on the daily basis? Sure its not as bad as it was “back in my days”. But the problem is still prevalent. And I believe that having an AI that can guide you through learning curve is fantastic!

And don’t forget the moguls aka the non-coding folks. Just as power tools opened the doors for non woodworking actual artists to join furniture design, AI assisted tooling can let non-programming folks in the game and I fully welcome that. At least I won’t have to fix startups written by people who used to eat glue as children for a living anymore. For all intents and purposes I see that as a win for all of us.

Fun fact. Believe it or not but the woodworking industry is still dealing with the aftermath and keeps arguing about what a “hand crafted” product even means. And the “real woodworkers” didn’t disappear either. There is always someone willing to pay for having a piece of real human suffering in their entertainment room I guess.

And don’t get me wrong here. The thing is not static and it’s evolving at a scary pace and doubt it will stay at the tool status for long. Eventually AIs will replace Staff+ engineers too; and what a good riddance that will be. But, it won’t replace me the human being who just wants to make stuff. If anything it will empower me to make bigger better things. And I think that’s fantastic news and I can’t wait to see what happens!

In the meanwhile, it is my believe that AI-forward companies and individuals will prevail. And the haters? Well, they will keep hating. Such is life.

PS: but it hallucinates! well, yes it does. but it actually tells you the truth too, at least the version of it that should statistically exist. And I swear in 90% of the cases I wish it did. And it’s a good thing, it tells you what’s worth fixing. And it can fix it for you too.

PPS: but the copyright ethics! well look, i’m not an ethics specialist but here is my take. I can understand why artists would be concerned with this, they have been stealing from each other for centuries, and I can understand the discomfort. But, about 90% of the current software engineering population grew up copypasting code from stack overflow. So… I don’t feel like we get to complain. We’re basically doing the same thing just faster at this point.

PPPS: but someone is getting rich on this; this is not fair. well, yes, someone is always getting rich. an yes, the world is not fair. we can agree on that.