Hello again! After some months of quite a lot of work, I feel the need to go back to writing here.
What a time to be in this industry! Technological breakthroughs every week, a constant redefinition of our roles and responsibilities, tools getting deprecated before they even get to their pinnacle… and all of that mixed with a harmonious identity crisis for just over 47 million software developers worldwide.
Nobody Knows What's Going On (And That's Fine)
Where are we going? Anyone who claims to know is either lying to feed their ego or trying to sell you something. Big actors in the AI world are constantly defining what the perfect workflow is, what the greatest set of tools are, what the best way to persuade your swarm of agents to behave somewhere near a thinking entity is. To me, that sounds mostly like a big pile of bs trying to look appetising for the clicks – nothing more.
No-one knows what the future looks like. What am I even saying? No-one knows what the present looks like!
The Death of the Coding Guru
All I know is that the archetype of the "coding guru" is dying, and I'm very glad to see that happening.
The "guru" archetype was always hurtful to our industry: a single knowledge-accumulating person that increases the bus-factor of any team by a gazillion times, often paired with a cocky-know-it-all personality that everyone despises but no-one is willing to disrupt just in case you lose their high impact.
Hurray! The witch is dead! There's no more need for that horrible person to terrorise our teams! Obviously you still need expertise in your frameworks and tools – someone still needs to make decisions – but it's no longer centralised in one person. Everyone has their own Jarvis to pair with and, as long as they use it to think more and not to delegate more and just fool around while they wait, we can't wait for anything but amazing things to come.
Where I See Myself in a Year
It's funny how this technological revolution we're currently going through reduced the visibility to the point where thinking "where will I be in 5 years?" sounds like you're trying to visualise where the human race will be in 5000 years. We saw our work life be shifted completely in the last 2 years, so thinking long term is a privilege only for the clairvoyant kind.
I know that my work has changed: I have invested a lot of my time for years on software design and architecture, which now proves to be very useful. More useful than purely implementation details.
Something that I see myself investing more and more in is work planification — which is interesting because for a long time software engineers tried to get rid of that activity and delegate it to project managers. The model was clear: the IC path is about impact, and work breakdown is about more work. Now the model has changed: a SWE's impact is directly correlated with the amount of work they can delegate to agents — and how to do that better is directly impacted by how you break down that work, and the preparation you do on how to think about problems in terms an agent can work on in their most independent way possible.
Has this changed my vision of my work? In some way, but not entirely. I'm still responsible for delivering value in software – whether I'm implementing it or I'm using a robot to do so, no-one cares. And that freedom! That's liberating! That's focusing on what's most interesting for me. I love it.
Final Thoughts
If you have to take something from this post: No-one knows shit. Don't feel bad about being a bit lost — we're all in the same sea of change, being hit by wave after wave of novelty and shiny things. Do not despair! Now's a great moment to find new opportunities for growth. That's the nice thing about revolutions: we all can change our positions. This is now open water.