I really like building products, and with AI now I can just offload huge parts of the technical duties, and do the actual product building much faster. For me this is where the real satisfaction is. Yes of course, there was a lot of satisfaction with doing it myself, fixing a bug, problem or finally implementing something after a long grind.
But honestly I do not miss it at all. The further AI coding advances, the easier it becomes to build and iterate over small products (even if they just start out as MVPs). And the more I actually feel in my element. I understand why people dislike it, but it feels as if these tools where specifically made for me; and I am getting more and more exited while these keep getting better.
In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.
> In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.
To use the woodworking analogy of the (current) top comment, the woodworking equivalent of this is to call someone to build you a cabinet and come back home after they're done. Which of course is how most people get their cabinets built.
But it's not woodworking, for sure. Which for someone who just wants a cabinet, that's cool. But for someone who enjoyed the woodworking part of it, not cool.
I am a staff cloud consultant at a 3rd party AWs company specializing in software development + cloud architecture. My day job consists of.
1. Working with sales to land clients
2. Doing management consulting style projects where I tell the client what they should do.
3. Designing the architecture from the infra side and code.
4. Leading implementations and on smaller projects doing the hands on keyboard work by myself and on larger projects, leading a team
I don’t use AI agents. What I will do is use ChatGPT as a junior developer where I tell it the context of the problem, diagrams, and I will build up the pieces with the abstractions, modules etc I want. While the architect of a building may not build everything themselves and they definitely won’t be building the cabinets, they should have a vision of how everything is built and guide how it works together.
But honestly I do not miss it at all. The further AI coding advances, the easier it becomes to build and iterate over small products (even if they just start out as MVPs). And the more I actually feel in my element. I understand why people dislike it, but it feels as if these tools where specifically made for me; and I am getting more and more exited while these keep getting better.
In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.