This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Gore, a 38-year-old AI engineer at Reach3 Insights, a market research firm based in Vancouver. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I graduated with a computer science degree back in 2010, and I’ve worked in the industry since.
I started as a typical software engineer working on some of the interesting and complex problems in marketing research. Now, I’m an AI engineer.
I have mixed feelings about the impact of AI on the software engineering industry.
I completely handed off all my coding-related tasks to AI in December, and it did really well. I did not feel good about that initially. I’ve been coding for so long, and I realized at the time that coding is definitely gone.
I haven’t coded since then. That’s the new reality of my job. Just because AI has taken over my coding tasks, though, doesn’t mean I can play outside all day. I’m still able — and expected — to produce the same level of output and quality of work. Sometimes I feel burned out because the expectation is that I should be doing more work, even though AI can take over some tasks.
I’m excited about AI and enjoy how it’s changed my job
Right now, AI needs a lot of guardrails, and I believe that my background and systems knowledge still make me pretty useful.
I’m happy that I haven’t coded in three months because there’s a lot that I’m doing, like software architecture and design, that isn’t going anywhere. AI can help architect or design, but it needs a lot of hand-holding today. That makes the knowledge of software engineering more important than ever in the age of AI — at least for now.
There is also a lot of systems thinking that needs to be applied, which I love and am completely in harmony with, so it’s a good state for me.
I’ve been coding for years, and at the end of the day, it’s a means to an end. I never saw it as rocket science. But there is a lot of nuance to coding, which can be frustrating and tiring to work with at times. So, I’m enjoying this next era.
AI also lets me do a lot more research, and faster. It allows me to question product decisions and think more, rather than just execute. As an engineer, I was constantly under delivery pressure, but now it frees me up and actually allows me to critique what a project manager is doing, because I understand the product decisions that are being made. It helps me take on a broader product engineering role, which I’m enjoying.
I’m feeling happy that I can deliver at this pace, because that wasn’t possible earlier. It’s cool that I can make a feature in two or three days instead of a month. That’s a crazy transformation that I feel happy and excited about.
I’m concerned about the future
Even though I’m enjoying the current state, there’s always this behind-the-scenes thought of, “Ok, what’s next?” The technology is getting better every day. I’m not comfortable with AI being in a state where it can run on its own forever. I don’t know what I would do in that scenario.
It feels weird that the job has changed so much. Sometimes I find myself speechless. I have so many thoughts and emotions going on. Most of them have turned into excitement, but the more I think about it, the more it turns into fear. Sometimes I felt intimidated because these agents are so powerful.
I even openly said in my company’s Slack that there’s no way in my lifetime I could’ve coded something even 10% as good as these agents. At the end of the day, if you look at a typical problem, most humans are no match for solving them, unless you’re talking about the 1% geniuses.
Sometimes I feel defeated because coding was a skill I acquired over time and it took a lot of time to get to a state where I could do that well. It’s not that I don’t like the change, but there’s a fear there.
What happens if all of this gets completely automated and people just ask AI for things?
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