Know thy IDE; Use thy AI

Suddenly it’s not funny when it happens to you

Aren’t you feeling obsolete as the day passes by? Don’t you have a terrible feeling in your stomach that is warning you to pack your luggage and organize your belongings, because soon you will not be the one who will be working on the features you are building, fixing the bugs you were challenged by, or deploying the products and services you and your team contributed a lot to?

Yes, you are not the only person feeling anxious and uncertain about their job security. This is not an irrational fear nor a stupid conspiracy theory. The stats reflect you have good, if not great, reasons to freak out and keep on the lookout for a layoff or sudden automation. While the job market’s odd behaviour in recent years is not entirely impacted by the boom in AI and new capabilities unlocked by the tech giants, it is self-evident that almost all companies will no longer invest in entry-level/junior talent due to the cost-effective nature of hiring a mid-level/senior engineer with an advanced agentic/generative large language model subscription among those that have flooded the San Francisco start-up vortex.

Meet Punched Cards

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This used to be programming, by the way

For those of us accustomed to high-level programming languages and the need to memorize keywords, syntax, and their semantic structure, it is hard to imagine what programming meant before the advent of compilers. Coding was literally punching holes into cardboard, and debugging meant throwing away hours of tedious work by tossing it aside and redoing the same boring task again. Programmers had to dumb themselves down to the level of machines to make points. Programmers had to be more patient and had to deal with this despite the tiresome nature of their careers.

AI is not a Foe

The introduction of high-level programming languages and compilers reimagined software engineering. It made it a lot easier for people to learn how to print Hello World on the console. It made the barrier to entry lower than ever, and it continued doing so with the introduction of languages that avoid the boilerplate anatomy of previous ones, a declarative approach to building UIs, and a more simplified way of managing states.

What AI did is part of this abstraction and simplification, but in a manner that is harder to comprehend given its scale and rapid development. Now you can imagine the next feature in your app in English, and all you need to do is prompt it casually. Enhancing productivity and optimizing longer developer hours can be a major benefit of the large language models we now have. As developers navigating through this shift in the meaning of software development, we also need to appreciate the benefit it provides in making it way accessible and easier to learn new stuff to help us unlock the best of our potential.

Vibe Coding is Rapid Shipping

It is not that hard to understand that the impact of enhanced productivity and resourcefulness would translate into the rapid design, development, and deployment of products. Shying away from using AI for your career is like silencing your IDE’s help in code completion or helpful warnings to finally get your time wasted on trying to seem cool/smart. As people in this sector, we have one choice and it is to adapt early on and embrace changes in the industry. Better tooling, better productivity, better learning methods.