This Has Always Been the Job
AI is changing my job and yours, and it is a reflection of the failings of our socio-cultural and technical systems.
These are two conclusions I've come to in my deep dive into AI developer tools in the past two weeks. And I'm not alone:
- Test Double says that AI won't replace your team, it will expose leadership gaps.
- OpenAI has published guidelines for good prompts.
- MIT has an AI Basics article on good prompts.
- Dave Farley recently published a video on acceptance testing being the future of development.
- No link for this one, but a colleague and I recently hashed out requirements for good feedback to AI agents. Testing and clear test output was one of them.
Writing code is just the last step in the process. It's the moment of joy when we see our work come to life.
AI changes this by emphasizing the critical and challenging work of making clear design decisions, verifying our work, and iterating on both our successes and our failures.
Our job has always been to think of edge cases, check our assumptions, and be purposeful in what we build.
Prompt engineering, AI, agents, and LLMs introduce a new mode of doing this work. One that requires careful application and thoughtful experimentation.
