I vividly remember my summer vacation of 2000 that I spent building my personal homepage. In a span of few months, what started as a drag-drop experience of customizing my homepage on Geocities quickly transitioned to actually working with hand-crafting HTML, CSS and Javascript, to finding a free host to upload the HTML pages, complete with a free sub-domain. Up until that point I had been a consumer, now a creator.
Over the next few years, I continued building webpages, assembling PCs, and eventually learning to code while pursuing my diploma and bachelor’s in computer science. Learning to code transformed my general curiosity into a passion for programming. Writing code felt like poetry, building software felt like art, and I felt like an artist.
Last 18 years, I have been deeply engrossed in all facets of delivering software products. Over the years I have transitioned to a leadership role where writing code that you are sing handedly responsible is considered a bottleneck, so I’ve found my own small ways to keep my skills sharp. I felt a sense of security knowing that I had the most consequential skill in the digital world. Writing code gave me my identity. It game me a feeling of purpose and responsibility.
Like all shifts in tech, it starts off with the curiosity of early adopters, a hype cycle and then mass adoption. In the last few decades we have witness a few - transition from desktop apps to web apps, mobile, SAAS, cloud computing, and now AI. ChatGPT from OpenAI catapulted the experimental AI initiatives from early adopters straight into mass adoption by being the fastest-growing consumer application in history. At a macro level it’s not off to say that the Internet, Cloud Computing and now AI are clear generational shifts/markers.
In the last year odd I don’t remember a single day when I have not interacted with ChatGPT. Be it work or personal errands, ever time I have reached out, I have been amazed. ChatGPT has seamlessly played the role of a coding intern, a copywriter for marketing, technical writer for engineering docs, office admin for writing memos, advisor for technical trade-offs and also a therapist. ChatGPT has helped me overcome my skill gaps and areas where I didn’t think I had any skills. I already feel like a superhuman.
Last few months, I have continued exploring other AI models, particularly Claude 3.5 Sonnet and AI code plugins like Cursor. As a programmer, I have been proficient in writing production-level code in Javascript / Node.js and Ruby. With Claude, I have been able to build single page apps and utilities in Python, shell script, Dart, Go and Rust. Programming language is no longer a barrier. I can truly use the best language/framework for the task at hand. I feel 10x more productive. I feel limitless.
Albeit, I feel like a consumer again. Hear me on this. All these years, I have been writing code. When I got stuck, I would Google, pick relevant snippets from Stack Overflow or GitHub Gist, and adapt them for my needs. With AI, I find myself copying and pasting or replacing blocks of code without needing additional debugging. If it doesn’t, I simply paste the error as a prompt or clarify what I want in a subsequent prompt. Yes, there have been cases of hallucinations, but more often than not, it’s my prompts that are incomplete rather than the model being wrong.
Instead of an intern, I now have a dedicated team of mid-senior level polyglot engineers, each with the experience of writing millions of lines of code - right at my disposal. The output is limited only by my prompts. But I feel no ownership over these lines of code. I am no longer the creator; I am the consumer. I will need a new identity. I will need to find a new purpose.