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> I’ve never even able to make a mobile app before. My skillset was just a bit too far off and my background more in the backend. > Now I have a complete app th

by allenu 11mo ago

> I’ve never even able to make a mobile app before. My skillset was just a bit too far off and my background more in the backend. > Now I have a complete app thanks to AI. And I do feel a sense of accomplishment. AI is such an existential threat to many of us since we value our unique ability to create things with our skills. In my opinion, this is the source of immediate disgust that a lot of people have. A few months ago, I would've bristled at the idea that someone was able to write a mobile app with AI as that is my personal skillset. My immediate reaction when learning about your experience would've been, "Well, you don't really know how to do it. Unlike myself, who has been doing it for many, many years." Now that I've used AI a bit more, like yourself, I've been able to do more that I wasn't able to before. That's changed my perspective of how I look at skills now, including my own. I've recognized that AI is devaluing our unique skillsets. That obviously doesn't feel great, but at the same time I don't know if there's much to be done about that. It's just the way things are now, so the best I can do is lean into the new tools available and improve in other ways.

dangus 11mo ago
It's entirely possible that this will turn us all into much less of a special highly-compensated profession, and that would suck. Although when you say "AI is devaluing our unique skillsets," I think it's important to recognize that even without AI, it's not our skillsets that ever held value. Code is just a means to translate business logic into an automated process. If we had the same skillset but it couldn't make the business logic do the business, it has no value. Maybe this is a pedantic distinction, but it's essentially saying that the "engineer" part of "software engineer" is the important bit - the fact that we are just using tools in our toolbox to get whatever "thing" needs to get done. At least for now, it seems like actually possessing a skillset is helpful and/or critical to using these tools. They can't handle large context, and even if that changes, it still seems to be extremely helpful to be able to articulate on a detailed level what you want the AI to develop for you. An analogy to that is that if you just put your customer in front of a development team and tell them how to make the application, versus putting a staff engineer or experienced product manager in front of them. The AI might be able to complete the project in both cases, but with that experienced person it's going to avoid a lot of pitfalls and work faster/better. This analogy reminds me of a real-life instance where I built something that someone higher than director level basically spelled out exactly, essentially dictating the architecture to me that I was to follow. They don't really see my code, they might even hate my code, I am like an AI to them. And indeed, by dictating to me a very good architecture, I was able to basically follow that blindly and ran into very few problems.
jimbokun 11mo ago
What other ways?

by allenu 11mo ago

dangus 11mo ago

It's entirely possible that this will turn us all into much less of a special highly-compensated profession, and that would suck. Although when you say "AI is devaluing our unique skillsets," I think it's important to recognize that even without AI, it's not our skillsets that ever held value. Code is just a means to translate business logic into an automated process. If we had the same skillset but it couldn't make the business logic do the business, it has no value. Maybe this is a pedantic distinction, but it's essentially saying that the "engineer" part of "software engineer" is the important bit - the fact that we are just using tools in our toolbox to get whatever "thing" needs to get done. At least for now, it seems like actually possessing a skillset is helpful and/or critical to using these tools. They can't handle large context, and even if that changes, it still seems to be extremely helpful to be able to articulate on a detailed level what you want the AI to develop for you. An analogy to that is that if you just put your customer in front of a development team and tell them how to make the application, versus putting a staff engineer or experienced product manager in front of them. The AI might be able to complete the project in both cases, but with that experienced person it's going to avoid a lot of pitfalls and work faster/better. This analogy reminds me of a real-life instance where I built something that someone higher than director level basically spelled out exactly, essentially dictating the architecture to me that I was to follow. They don't really see my code, they might even hate my code, I am like an AI to them. And indeed, by dictating to me a very good architecture, I was able to basically follow that blindly and ran into very few problems.

jimbokun 11mo ago

What other ways?