Taiob Ali is asking how AI is changing our careers. It’s a good question – one question worth reflecting on, even if the general perception among many people I talk to is ‘not much yet’.
There are definitely plenty of people who use AI to help with emails, or as a replacement search engine, and anyone who’s writing code in a tool like VS Code will be getting code suggestions like never before, even if they’re not writing prompts for Copilot to write the code for them. But most of these people wouldn’t really say their careers have been changed – just that they’re becoming better at their job because of the tools that are now available.
I could ask an AI tool to write this post for me – but in some ways I feel like that’s avoiding the writing task, rather than just getting help with it.
But I think this has always been how it is with technology. There’s a process that is done by a person, and over time, the person gets better tools to help improve quality or speed or scale. Pretty soon, the job can be done by someone who doesn’t have the same skills as the original person, and later it can be done without a person being involved at all. My car’s ignition mechanism is a button I press. The car I had beforehand had a key that needed to be turned. Some electric cars just “turn on” when your phone is in the car. It’s all very different to my uncle’s 1902 Peugeot. It used to be a process that a person needed to be very much involved in, but now you barely even need to know that a car needs to be turned on.
When I learned to code, it was a Commodore 64. People told me I should learn to program using Assembly, but I saw benefit to the speed with which I could get programs created by leveraging the functionality provided within BASIC. I didn’t keep writing BASIC code, and different languages came with different frameworks to get different things done. The purists writing in low-level languages got left behind by the people leveraging other frameworks. Using those frameworks meant they could produce more functionality in less time.
As far as coding today, AI tools are like having another framework available. The packages available in most languages, including Python, PowerShell, JavaScript, .Net, and so many more, aren’t about to go away, but now AI provides the tools to use those packages more quickly. We’ve gone from grabbing a package and figuring out the nuances of how to use it to having AI recommend a package and write a bunch of code for us. The ‘no-code’ options provided by UI Wizards are being replaced by systems where we can talk to AI and get a system that works the way we want. It’s not exactly ‘no-code’, but it’s pretty close to ‘code-you-never-need-to-see’. For me, I’m hoping it’ll be like ‘produce tests to demonstrate the correctness of this’, especially given AI’s tendency to hallucinate.
I was doing AI at university in the early 90s. My lecturers were trying to persuade me to accept an offer of a PhD at Edinburgh University, but I went into consulting instead. AI back then was very different, but I know we’ve seen AI change our jobs for many years – we just might not have been noticing. LLMs have brought AI into the forefront of our thinking, brought it to regular people, so now it’s more obvious that AI is having an impact.
For everyone in IT – heck, everyone in every industry! – staying current is essential. We all need to be developing our skills and using the latest tools, so that we don’t get overtaken and made redundant by new technology that’s coming up. Our jobs aren’t necessarily going to be replaced, but the tools we were using yesterday have been replaced, and AI is just another tool that we should be loading into our toolsets.
@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)
