Silence on a plane

How are you feeling friend? Uncertain.

Why? The world is changing and it feels like I’m struggling to keep up.

How is the world changing? You’ll have to sit down for this one.

AI is getting to the point where it’s affecting the world around me. Software development, as a profession, as a practice, a culture, and a medium for changing the world is evolving. Different days have me feeling different ways about this. There’s the excitement of change and potential, with the grief of missing simpler and happier times.

There’s different ways to dig into this, and I don’t want to get into all the technical aspects now. In short, I feel funny.

I’m someone whose self-assured career security comes from the hope that staying ahead of the curve, and working just a little bit harder than everyone else will be rewarded. That hope has crumbled, and I’m beginning to question future of the software development industry itself.

What is the point of developing technical faculties, personal knowledge and capability if the next AI model can come along and render you ineffective? You comfort yourself with perceived faults and limitations of these systems, but when you zoom out, you see yourself moving the line backwards each day.

At some point, it was “You can talk to it. But it can’t write code.” Today, it can navigate and understand your codebase and solve problems in it, just like you.

Today, I find myself reaching for philosophy and trying to arrive at foundational truths to reassure myself that the machine will always be inferior than the human. In some ways, that might always remain true. However, the lines are blurring. The machine isn’t human. It has limitataions, but we are collaborating on ways to work around them. Tooling improves, foundations improve, and each time I retreat, I wonder whether there will even be something to retreat to next time.

Each time the world of software changes, I do my best to adapt. I pick up the new tools, look for better ways to use them, understand how they affect me and people around me. In some ways, I’m a part of the problem, but I’m also desparately hoping for a solution. No matter what I do, it never feels like enough. I’m running a race that never ends. I’m starting to wonder if running this race to keep up with AI is even worth it. Maybe, I should just go back to the how we used to do things pre-AI in the good old days. Back then, I had fun.

I’m writing this on a flight forcefully disconnected from the internet, and the noise that accompanies it. The world feels noisier than even, and the ringing in my ears haven’t stopped in a while. People make promises and prophesis of what the world will become, and they are scary. Some of these promises come true, and some are lies meant to serve hidden agendas. I’ve started to trust less, and verify more, but even that process is self-defeating in the face of the sheer volume of everything that’s thrown at you.

It’s been at the back of my mind, but I’ve been looking forward to this disconnection.
My feeble attempts at self-regulation haven’t worked. I’ve been looking forward to the silence.