The new AI era

The last year was crazy: AI, AI and AI. Everybody is talking about it and trying to make as much money as possible from it. Its growth is becoming extremely intimidating. I was skeptical for a long time about applying AI to my work due to concern regarding accuracy and its effect to software industry. However, I cannot fight the current; otherwise, I will be the one that got left behind. So I started to integrate it into my workflow. Suprisingly, AI asistants have been extremely helpful for my productivity.

In my opinion, the existence of AI means that we have to raise our bar for what we, as software engineer, produce. We have the power to do much more than the pre-AI era. I have absolutely no idea what is the ceiling, so I decided to take a side freelance gig with a sole purpose of testing the limit of AI. I want to push the AI to its limit, let it handle all the coding; I would only be the pilot guiding it to build things.

The process went surprisingly well. I have been able to finsh the whole project in just 2 weeks, with average of 4-5 hours per day. AI excels in some aspects that I’m not good at such as UI design, working with Tailwind and CSS. Of course it made some mistakes but with my instruction, solving is was no big deal. However, that’s where my deficiency becomes clear: when I let the AI do all the coding, I would be the only person to deal with client. And oh boy, it was a disater, I made many mistakes by making assumptions, ‘freestyling’ feature without any agreement. If I got a chance to do it again, I would have made Claude to to all the business analyst for me as well.

So the answer has never been clearer to me. Coding is no longer a bottleneck, what we, software engineer now doing is provide a good solution and guide the LLM in the right direction. Regarding the making decision process, I’m not entirely convinced that AI can outperform us yet. I faced some issues regarding Kubernetes cluster infrastructures but Claude just straight up hallucinated and provided made-up solutions.

As Matteo Colina wrote in his articles here, the industry is changing rapidly. In Vietnamese market, I strongly believe that the ’third path’ mentioned his articles will take a majority. Like in my case above, the client have some specific requirements that no other Saas can provide. So we can ride solo, but in order to do that, we must upgrade our soft skills: sale, business analytics and business development.

Now I’m less worry about how AI will take our jobs, my focus has shifted toward how to out growth in this market. I have finished my experiments with software development using AI. It’s time to get back with the DevOps realm.