Now that more people are using gen ai, there other skills to focus on that you can’t automate away:
1. Taste - you build a sense of what works/doesn’t work after getting your hands dirty over time
2 - Marketing - how do you share a project/idea with the world?
How am I supposed to show up every day and be a productive member of society, when I frequently see stuff like this?
In my tech career, we've gone from modems to frame relay to ISDN, to cable modems to FIOS with a potential for multiple Gb/s to my house. We also moved from flip phones to Palm Treos to iPhones. I've coded in C, Java, Python, Go and Rust. I used to write most of my software. Now claude-opus does.
The people who built Kubernetes and React weren't only good devs. They were deep in one area and literate across several others. Don't look at the outputs and assume the hard part was the building, not taste. GenAI doesn't change this. You still need to develop taste for what will and won't work.
I’m using agents in Claude cli and Kiro cli to answer what if. Previously, we could never go chase down all the questions in our heads due to lack of time and energy. Today, I’m building things only to see what happens. If I don’t like the outcome, I build another thing. Feels like a super power.
I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of people in tech don't know how tech actually works. You sitting down at a keyboard and write love letters (code) is a very small part of big success.
The same people who were selling digital monkeys and internet coins are now telling you they use GenAI to build code that they never read. I don't know how this story ends, but it's not one with a happy ending.
How are you supposed to learn how to code if you can’t copy the code out of the back of a Byte magazine?
I’m having lots of success using tools like Claude code to think, iterate on ideas, and write useful code. As someone who has been coding a very long time, this is a real improvement. The best part is that if I want to write something myself, I still can. But why? So many problems, so little time.
If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...
