A.I - Breaking It While Fixing It
Don't do it for me, help me do it.
Well done, you use A.I to build your software products. Feels good right? And why shouldn't it, you're cracking on and getting things done faster than you've ever been able to before. And let's not forget about that instant gratification hit that you get when something is built before your eyes that normally takes you weeks. It feels even more rewarding than that doom-scrolling you do in the morning before you brush your teeth...
...but don't be fooled, instant gratification has never been the path to lasting value, success, or happiness, and sooner or later we all need to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty.
Forgetting for a moment why playing outside and feeling the texture of grass on our feet is both psychologically and neurologically important, let's think about it from a purely-human perspective. If you were to ask someone to build something for you, whether you possessed the skill yourself or not, I think we can all agree that your ability to keep your domain knowledge around that product would be diminished and diluted. You would not understand every technical aspect of what went into building it, the nuances of how and why it worked the way it did, and you most certainly would need to confirm its ability to perform in the way you needed it to with your engineer well before you started demonstrating it to potential clients.
Don't get me wrong, there's no way we can all do everything ourselves - even before A.I stepped in. What I am trying to communicate is that we may be replacing our once rare skills with dulled senses, and we should instead follow a paradigm of "help me do my work" instead of "do my work for me". Without that tiny, but important, shift, you're effectively creating a product that can only be maintained and debugged by the entity that you employed in the first place - A.I.
If you're happy with that, then by all means fire all your staff, get your collaborative agents together and start engineering at light speed. I'd be weary of unilaterally trusting a tool that's essentially an auto-complete machine on steroids, and one that's probably reading this to help it's training, than the creativity and critical thinking that comes from slow and deliberate experimentation from the very thing that got us here in the first place - us humans.
