AI Will Change My Job and Yours
If you had asked me how AI has changed my work a few months ago, I would have said that I get a few tedious tasks done faster and use it for a bit of research, but my job hasn't changed much otherwise.
In the past month, I have gone off the deep end. And I am still figuring out what that means. It's scary. It's exciting. It's a lot to take in.
While I have my doubts about AI bias and environmental impact, I am convinced it will dramatically change the way we work in the same way that the industrial revolution changed manual labour.
To be frank, I am equal parts thrilled that I won't have to trudge through small bug tickets any more and afraid that the industry is heading for a massive overhaul and I'll be left in the dust.
Working effectively with AI will help you work effectively with human coworkers. A clear context, with specific outcomes described in writing allows people to understand your intent and AI to understand your requests.
My Takeaways
- Use AI as a companion. Not a search engine. LLM's can help you think through problems, they can quickly discover rabbit holes you might otherwise get stuck on. They are wrong. But so are we. It's just so much easier to say to an LLM "that's wrong, try again" and it will.
- Automate your work. A few weeks ago I opened a project I wasn't familiar with and found there was no logging and no error reporting. I used Cursor to rewrite large parts of the project to add logging and error reporting. With Cursor, I made huge improvements to the project's observability in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to learn the repo and do the work myself.
- Lean in on systems thinking. If you can't write out a clear plan for you work, AI will struggle to understand what you want to do. Unsurprisingly, people work the same. I have put my hands on the keyboard before and hammered away until I have something that resembles the idea. But, with an AI companion, if you put in the up-front work of describing the problem, outlining the outcomes, and guiding the AI's knowledge, you will accelerate your work.
- AI will replace pushing tickets. There is comfort to logging in in the morning, grabbing a Jira ticket and clacking away on your keyboard until you pick up the next one. This job won't exist for long. An AI companion like devin.ai is able to pickup this work, propose changes, and work with you to do the work. Devin does the coding, developers do the guiding and correcting.
- Understand the big picture. To work effectively with AI, you need to understand the context of the code you're working with, how this code impacts the architectural direction, and what the outcome of your work should be. The more relevant context you have, the better you will work with an AI companion.
Reading List
Here are a few articles I've read that have changed how I approach AI in my work.
Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.
This next one isn't about AI but it is about how we work. If you take the principles of this post in account when working with AI, you and your AI companion will be extremely impactful. If you are frozen in the fear of never being wrong, you and your AI will hallucinate defensive code that even you don't understand.
[Some] engineers avoid being wrong by never making confident technical statements. I think this is a dereliction of duty. If you’re the most technical person in the room, it’s your responsibility - your job - to give information and advice. Always saying “well, I’m not sure” or qualifying all your statements makes it very hard for less technical people to work with you. In any case, the principle is “be right a lot”, not “never be wrong”. You can’t be right a lot if you don’t put yourself out there.
Okay, so I hate "You are wrong" kind of articles, but there is some good stuff in here about using Cursor and other AI tools better.
Geoffrey Huntley
And another "I hate this" thing. I hate "guys." Just stop. My title for this post would be "The future belongs to the ambitious." Anyway, this is a good article about how things might change.
I seriously can't see a path forward where the majority of software engineers are doing artisanal hand-crafted commits by as soon as the end of 2026.
Geoffrey Huntley
And this one accurately describes my last week.
Engineering organizations right now are split between employees who have had that "oh fuck" moment, are leaning into software assistants and those who have not.
Geoffrey Huntley
An "oh fuck oh cool" moment of my own. My partner and I were talking about how hard it is to pick paint colours and "couldn't AI solve that" (a question we like to ask a lot because even if it sounds bonkers, or easy, what would it actually look like to have AI solve a thing, is it worth it?).
Well, AI didn't easily solve the paint picking problem, but in a few minutes I did get Claude to build a pretty simple colour theme picker based on rudimentary colour theory. It didn't take long to write this and it required zero knowledge of the math behind it. I told it about the types of colour relationships and Claude took it from there.
OpenAI got mad that DeepSeek stole its stolen content. While I chuckled at this one it also made me wonder. "What is originality?" "What is creativity?"
Ethical dilemmas aside, AI is a big mirror in the cloud. It reflects back to us the very nature of our selves. Is everything we do borrowed from somewhere else? If AI has no qualms about stealing from artists what does that say about us?
Jason Koebler
