Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

This Monday, the US is observing Presidents' Day. I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• TBM 406: Seeing Everything, Understanding Nothing (The Context Trap). I like this newsletter about how real understanding emerges through interaction and joint activity, not by pooling documents.
• Diarmaid MacCulloch: How to Write Rigorously. I like this podcast in general. This was a good episode on being curious, questioning everything, and being empathetic with your reader!

Every week, there are posts with either "don't bother learning to code" or "learning to code is more important than ever".

I feel that both extremes are bad, and in reality, we'll settle on some level of AI-assisted development. The more layoffs there are, the more productivity we'll try to squeeze out of developers.

Coding will always be important due to the fact that you need to review the code being produced, not only production code, but also tests, for example. You would never be able to apply any rigor to the code being produced if you're not able to understand it.

Coding as we know it today will probably be "abstracted" behind natural language as the new programming language. This is not saying that "handcrafted"/"artisanal" coding will disappear completely, as we still have industries using COBOL or AS/400 systems.

One case I've seen at work is that coding has never been the activity that takes the most time in our days. We spent a lot of time in meetings, be it "agile ceremonies" (sprint planning, grooming), incident response, post-mortems, 1-on-1s, etc. And for many people, coding is either the reason they became software engineers or the "enjoyable" part of the job.

There's something about coding, and that immediate feedback loop from the IDE red squiggly lines, to tests passing, to a successful build. Solving a bug feels amazing!

So, for those who enjoy that part of the job, what happens when we become managers of the AI agents? We shift to writing markdown files, managing agents, and reviewing the output of those tools.

Maybe we'll transition coding to an after-hours activity, like painting or knitting. It's not only enjoyable but also highly creative.

Your turn!

How is your journey with AI at the moment? Are you all-in, so-so, or not using it at all? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email.

Happy coding!