I recently guested on the Context Window podcast hosted by IBM’s Anant Jhingran and Ed Anuff. It was fun. I usually try to bring some pragmatism to a conversation, and this was no exception. One message I really want to get across to people is that your skills are still relevant. AI is disruptive, but that doesn’t mean it won’t create great opportunities for you.
Ed asked me about the challenge of keeping up with everything happening in the industry right now, which reminds us of the Javascript framework wars – oh my god I didn’t read Hacker News this morning, how will I even be able to write code?
He asked: “You’re a dev so how do you not lose your mind? What’s the path to sanity?”
Now It’s literally my job to know all of that stuff – OMG there is a new model. A new thing dropped. A widget, a platform, a frontier model, a startup. We’re in the midst of a builder frenzy.
I said that, as ever, people are a big part of the answer. You need some folks to help digest all of this stuff for you (snakes swallowing elephants). Yes AI wants to do it (“let me summarise that for you”), but it turns out humans are really good at digesting, understanding and summarising stuff for you. Who knew?
So yeah, who’s gonna help you navigate the thicket? You can’t spend all of your time trying to work out what’s really important to your day job, or your side project. There are some amazing summarisers, so I would say listen to them, and learn from them, to help you navigate this incredibly fast moving space, without being worried about that pace of innovation.
Don’t try and follow everyone. Don’t spend all your time on X worrying about the latest launch you missed. Don’t be stressed about it. But by all means use AI in your daily work. If you’ve tried it before and been disappointed then I recommend you try it again. Generated code doesn’t all have six or four fingers any more.
So here are some people who can make your life better, by doing the work.
Angie Jones was originally a Java developer and is now a world class developer relations practitioner, technologist and educator. Today she runs dev rel at Block and she’s helping to build momentum around the company’s Goose AI agent. The work Angie and her colleague Rizel Scarlett are doing is practical, with applications of AI to software development. Angie is also helping to make it abundantly clear that your existing skills are relevant. Her recent post about How Developer Relations leading AI adoption is thought-provoking: it turns out that when everything is changing all the time, as it is in AI, teaching and samples and proofs of concept are more important than ever. Her team is doing industry defining work. Dev rel is having a renaissance because AI is all about education. So Follow Angie!
Simon Willison– every time I give a talk about AI in any context I tell people to pay attention to him. He is from the Python world, but endlessly curious about seemingly everything AI-related. Brilliant communicator. If there is one thing you read every day, go and check out what Simon Willison has to say. He will help you understand which technologies are ready for prime time and what’s happening across the industry.
Claire Vo – CEO and founder of ChatPRD. Amazing communicator about the value of AI tools from a business perspective. She is building a product management platform using all the latest models and AI tools. Follow Claire, you’ll get an entertaining, positive view of what works and what doesn’t. So get yourself over to her YouTube channel How I AI.
Jesse Vincent – Best known for his work in the PERL community, where he was project lead. Also creator of the K-9 Mail email app for Android, which was acquired by Mozilla and rebranded as Thunderbird for Android. Anyway he’s doing excellent work helping people understand things like Claude Code Skills. Very practical, great writing. Read his blog Massively Parallel Procrastination. This piece, for example, is a good read – When it comes to MCPs, everything we know about API design is wrong.
“This might be a hard lesson to hear, but tools you build for LLMs are going to work much, much better if you think of your end-user as a “person” rather than a computer. Build your tools like they’re a set of scripts you’re handing to that undertrained kid who just got hired in the NOC. They are going to page you at 2AM when they can’t figure out what’s going on or when they misuse the tools in a way they can’t unwind.
Names and method descriptions matter far more than they ever have before.”
Richard Seroter – he doesn’t just take a Googley view of the world. It’s about education. He takes a practitioner-based view and does a great job of keeping track of the latest developments, models and tools. His daily reading list is very useful.
And finally Rachel Stephens and Kate Holterhoff, my colleagues – are doing great work, using the tools and helping people understand them.
Your skills are relevant. There are great educators out there that are willing and ready to help you. If you’re struggling, then go on the internet and they will help you. You don’t even need to ask ChatGPT. I think it’s really exciting. To be honest I got slightly worried in 2023 – have I really got another revolution in me? As this bubble went into super expansion – I am a developers and practitioners matter guy, and do I have another rev in me? The answer is yes I do, and I think you probably do too. Its reassuring to know there are people ready and willing to help.
disclosure statement – IBM and Google are both clients.
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