I get this question with some frequency: does all this AI stuff affect me at work?

Ahem, yes. Yes it does.

In software, we are well past the point of “should we use AI?” Engineers are expected to use AI heavily - all the time, for everything. More than that, senior software engineers are expected to have an AI strategy, a program for how agentic tools plug into every activity: coding of course, but also research, debugging, learning, and on and on. It is much more than a default, but a very strong norm.

It’s clear that agentic coding has the potential to dramatically accelerate software development. But we are absolutely still in the “figuring it out” phase. A lot of my attention these days goes into questions like: how do you structure work for agents, how do you review what they produce, how do you keep systems understandable, how do you avoid subtle failures, and how do you stay oriented while multiple semi-autonomous processes are operating at once?

One of the most notable changes is the modality of programming itself. Programming used to be intensely interactive: type a little, run a little, inspect a little. Increasingly, the work is batch-oriented. You hand larger chunks of work to agents, wait an hour or three, review, redirect, repeat. And you have many batches running at once. That workflow creates a lot more context switching, and honestly I find the experience kind of stressful and cognitively slippery compared to the older style of programming.

At the same time, my ambitions for what I think I can personally build have expanded dramatically. I now have a whole backlog of ideas that feel genuinely achievable if I can maintain enough focus to effectively “babysit” the agents. In some ways, focus and attention have become the main bottleneck.

I also have substantial concerns about the environmental costs and broader societal effects of all this technology. I cringe at the thought of the climate impact of my token usage! I’m also very concerned with the problem of alienation: code appears under my name, but is it really mine? Have I actually put in the hard work to create a theory of the program, as Peter Naur put it? Unfortunately, the current situation feels like Moloch come alive: the incentives pushing companies and engineers toward AI adoption are incredibly strong at almost every level.

I’m aware that many of these observations may be very specific to software right now. My impression is that many other professions are using AI much less intensely than we are. In these industries the tools are causing a little heartburn, not wholesale changes to the entire food chain. These changes are pretty uncomfortable, but in some ways it’s what I signed up for: software goes through major paradigm shifts every 7 years or so, this one just happens to be very, very big.

I don’t know that I have a choice exactly, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the whole endeavor. In part because it’s easier to ship code out the door, and that’s inherently fun for me. More so, because there are a lot of people who feel like me, that the horizons of what’s possible are expanding. That means more ideas are seeing daylight, and more people have a chance to make a positive change. I suppose you could say I’m a technological optimist, though I know that technological changes are always double edged swords. I know all of that rainbow talk has a lot of thorny exceptions, but I hope we all benefit in the end.