What does it mean to code with AI as a software engineer?

I think I finally figured out how to describe the AI analogy. And right now it feels obvious.

I felt it when I walked into the kitchen of a new house and tried to make a dish. I struggled with the idea so much that I left the recipe in the fridge and waited until I got back to my own house.

The moment I was home, I wanted to make it. Everything was clear. Where the pots were. Where the pans were. The gas. How to get it all running. It was smooth. I made the dish I wanted, and I ate.

Meanwhile the nice vacation house we were renting, as much as I loved it, was hard to cook in. Because there was a butler.

Even when I decided I wanted to cook for myself, even after I had gone to the supermarket and bought the ingredients, I just couldn’t. I kept the items in the fridge and called the butler anyway, and asked him to make the food he already knew how to make. Because he couldn’t make my indigenous, home cooked meal.

And I realized that is kind of like AI for you right now.

You have a butler, in an expensive vacation house that you are renting.

Luckily, the butler is very good. He can make a lot of dishes. Even the ones we’ve quietly converted into our own special home dishes.

But here is the challenge. We may never enter the kitchen. We may never do inventory. We may never walk into the pantry again.

Because if, for some reason, we decide we should be in the kitchen, we’ll realize we have to figure out what kind of gas this house uses. How to work with ceramic pans instead of the ones we know. How much heat we actually want under our food.

The butler is so good he can get you your dish in five minutes, as long as you understand exactly what it is you really want to eat.

And then I think: this is the life of the AI software engineer. The forward deployed engineer.

So maybe we don’t fight it.

Maybe what we really need is to give the engineer an outlet. A way to always go back to his own house, the one he built himself, and make a dish every now and then. As a vacation. As a hobby he genuinely loves.

Because there is a butler now, and the butler does it so well. He doesn’t need to worry about making food anymore.

But just like a vacation, cooking becomes the vacation.

As long as he can afford to rent the vacation house, or something like it, or his company is willing to rent it for him, he is okay. And when he is not working, he can go home and make food for himself.

Which is why I think the only move right now, for every forward deployed engineer, is to keep one side project you write code for with your hands.

One side project that doesn’t really have customers, apart from you and a few friends.

And you just write the code by hand.