Becoming More by Martijn Faassen:
I want to admit that this AI/human me, this centaur me – my human understanding is on occasion limited. I lean on the AI quite a bit. Perhaps it isn’t genuine understanding. A tricky question in epistemology. Let’s not even talk about the AI understanding something, or not.
I do know this. I’ve always leaned on other people’s understanding - I’ve reused computers, programming languages, software libraries, implemented algorithms from books and wikipedia. I’ve used search engines. This is more broad than software development. I am limited and don’t understand everything about the world as it’s far, far too much. I stand on the shoulders of giants.
And that’s okay. I’m still empowered.
Let this empowerment sink in. Have you realized what this means? Have you realized what you can do now as a software developer?
I can use AI to do more. Not be more productive, that’s boring and that’s debatable.
Amen Martijn. I saw someone saying that if the AI tools worked really well, then employers would be forbidding them because people would be using them in order to work less. Because if you have an expectation of what could get done, then if you find a way of getting it done faster so you can go home, isn’t that okay? But for some group of employers that’d be tantamount to stealing!!1one
Now, there is a counter to this argument, Steve Yegge says in The AI Vampire:
Now let’s look at Scenario B. You decide instead that you will only work for an hour a day, and aim to keep up with your peers using AI. On that heavily reduced workload, you manage to scrape by, and nobody notices.
In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting AI.
In this scenario, your company goes out of business. I’m sorry, but your victory over The Man will be pyrrhic, because The Man is about to be kicked in The Balls, since with everyone slacking off, a competitor will take them out pretty fast.
I don’t know, maybe? I think there are certain types of jobs that will absolutely end up folding if they keep at current levels of work done without change. History shows sitting on an advantage without adjusting is not optimal for survival. And to be fair, Yegge’s post is against the grind culture and about finding a balance augmented by AI and to not become a hollow shell that commands the genie.
At the same time, I’ve started my own company, and I’m doing my best to not grind like I did working for others. I do have some runway from that work, but I hope there’ll be enough work coming in (or products built that makes money) that I’ll make do.
Instead, I have some work that helps me stay afloat, and it has given me time where I can play and explore. Maybe I can leverage it soon, maybe it becomes a rusty tool in the toolbox, or the cornerstone for something new.
Either way, I’m becoming more, as Martijn said.