It’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, I’m pretty excited about this change. It comes off weird sometimes because I, and most developers, I think, have a lot of thoughts about this new world. It’s a lot to process. I’ve spent the last, I dunno, four months chewing on what this means for my career, the industry, everything. Eventually I decided to start writing about it, and that’s how we got here.
The parts that excite me are the parts of programming that hooked me in the first place. You see the same sentiment all over the place: “this is the most excited I’ve been about programming in a long time.”, and that’s pretty much how I feel as well. There’s so much “new” again. It feels like the first time you realized you could make a machine do something it had no business doing.
My first programming experience was stumbling through a little breadboard robot with wheels my high school chemistry teacher let me borrow for the semester. It had sensors you could jam into the breadboard—a light sensor, LEDs, even “touch” whiskers. You programmed it in a language called PBASIC, which I absolutely did not understand. I spent most of my nights typing random snippets from the instruction manual into a file just to see if I could make it move. (Not unlike prompting an LLM, in hindsight.)
It was ridiculous and it was awesome. Type some words, and the real world reacts. I eventually got it to follow a flashlight in a dark room, and when the light cut out a little scoop would try to grab whatever sat in front of the robot. The idea was you could fish a dropped screw out from behind a toolbox. Did it work flawlessly? Absolutely not. Was it fun? Hell yeah.
That’s how I feel today. I have no idea what I’m doing with this new wave (neither does anyone else) and every day reveals a new way to use it, a new trick to a workflow. How often do you get to live through something like this? Depending on how far this “AI” thing actually goes, you could argue none of us have experienced anything comparable. If it reaches the potential it hints at, it might end up more transformative than the internet, than the personal computer, pick your landmark. (Yes, we needed computers to get here. You know what I mean.)
So yeah, I’m pumped that I get to be alive for this moment, to contribute in some small way, and maybe make a little money before the economic compass spins wild and we all have to recalibrate.
Update
My new favorite past-time is to put my blog posts through Suno. Enjoy.