Is It Still Fun?

I’ve had a few conversations over the past week that circled around the shifting or diminishing rewards of being a developer in the age of agents. If the fun of coding & debugging is shifted into agent loops, what’s the rewarding part of the job now? Answers varied, but themes like

• “I now have time for everything else...”
• “It’s like being in a library, I get to read, study, adapt and relearn everything every day...”
• “I don’t exactly know, is it going to be fun again…”

From my perspective, I don’t think that AI will replace my engineering capabilities, at least not yet. I may be naive, but it still takes at least some engineering skill to build a pipeline for cranking out software that is production ready. Then again creating code is not really the value I think a good engineer, or engineering leader brings to the job.

Anecdotally I’ve observed a key challenge in using this new automation superpower. Software exists to solve some customer need, whether it’s an internal tool to manage a business, or a consumer offering in the end a user interacts with what’s built. Setting aside future mass-market visions of Agents talking to Agents while end users sit around and wait to be prompted for input, the reality is that users need to be able to both continue their current jobs, and learn to work with the rapidly evolving set of digital tools being thrown at them. For me I think I need to spend some time reading & thinking through how to manage this accelerated rate of change to best support whoever my customers are. I suspect there’s something in the space of Cognitive Load Theory & Adaptive Micro Learning that I’ll be able to form into an approach to serving the consumer. One of the key skills of a leader or engineer is discernment, and I think we need that more than ever.

In addition, I think the value of a good engineering leader or developer is the ability to dialog about what should really be built, and whether it actually addresses what’s needed, not just what’s been asked for. Just like the PB&J Challenge shows it actually takes a lot of back and forth to really understand another human’s intent. Sure you can do a lot with frameworks like BMAD to dialog through and resolve ambiguities, but I still think there’s a ton of benefit in human conversation. It serves as a counter to the urge to just click accept/allow and let those agents rip, without really understanding the core of what’s needed. That ability to work down to actual requirements is fundamental especially with the ability to create with such speed.

In the end, I think that’s what the fun will be for me, learning these new skills and using them to find what I can do to accelerate others. The work is people not code, and that is an evergreen opportunity.