AI is here, and we should aggressively make it part of our workflow.
Ever since the advent of generative AI, the value of development skill, in itself, has had an exponential decline. I’ve been a very web development oriented person, I’ve picked the web as my canvas to express myself and to use it to solve consumer problems. I’ve had my rite of passage that went from learning HTML, CSS, JS that went on to JQuery and then finally to React. I’m an insufferable perfectionist, and I’ve always wanted to be a developer who is at the bleeding edge of the most recent technologies that help me create the best (read: responsive, cross-device, future proof, well optimized) but I’ve always been hesitant to move forward towards learning those technologies.
It feels kind of annoying to sit down and take a deep dive into typescript, Next.js and all that jazz, when there are tools like v0 or Bolt which can do what I’ve been struggling to do for months in less than a couple of minutes, and better. The inherent value of the skill itself, is now on the floor thanks to these tools. What’s even the point, anymore? These tools aren’t going to go anywhere, and even if they do, there will always be another one to replace its position. The demand for these tools shall always exist, and they are only going to get better exponentially as time progresses.
This is akin to the time when Microsoft shipped Excel in 1985 and suddenly every accountant was scared for their lives. This program popped out of nowhere and did every task an accountant could do faster, better and more accurately. But today, almost 40 years later, we can see that the accountants haven’t gone anywhere. They just went up a position: from menial calculations to more advanced and strategic functions like financial modelling, analysis and they’ve even gone much further with the help of machine learning algorithms.
I feel like this exact thing is now happening to us developers. Today, its the meniality of writing frontend code that’s been pulverized by these tools. Tomorrow, it will be the meniality of writing code for an entire app itself. It will be possible to create end-to-end applications, complete with logic, databases and authentication with nothing but a prompt/a string of prompts. This isn’t even a prediction, at the speed at which the industry is progressing, there’s probably already a tool shipped by the time I publish this post, for crying out loud.
It’s important to understand that instead of being afraid that our jobs are going to be taken over by robots, its more effective to sit down and ponder about how to let these robots accelerate our position. We’ve now been forcibly promoted to a managerial role, someone who now no longer has to worry about the technicalities of the application itself, but someone who now has to worry about the distribution: the marketing, the sales, the brand and the churn and everything else that us software devs are so afraid of. And that was exactly what was addressed in Varun Mayya’s video. It’s now more important than ever to pivot to a more distributionist role, start making noise and get up in people’s faces. Because at the end of the day, that’s what matters.
I’ve always been an entrepreneur, more than a developer. I’ve always treated the programming part of my skillset exactly for what it is: a medium to be able to help people solve their problems. The “finding a target audience” and the “understanding what they want” and the “product-market fit” always seemed more exciting than learning the latest JS framework or the hippest tech stack.
In a way, I am both nervous and excited for what’s to come. AI is making it harder for people to get jobs, and its also simultaneously making it easier for creating your own jobs. It’s now exponentially easier to become a solopreneur/micropreneur than ever, because for 20 dollars a month, you can have your own junior level engineer working alongside you so you can focus on the big things.
AI is here, and we must aggressively make it part of our development workflow, so we can focus on the bigger picture.