This told essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Gore, a 38-year-old AI engineer from the United States. Reach3 Insights is a Vancouver-based market research company. His identity and employment have been confirmed by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2010 and have been working in the industry ever since.
As a typical software engineer, I started working on some of the most interesting and complex problems in marketing research. Currently I’m an AI engineer.
I have mixed feelings about the impact of AI on the software engineering industry.
In December, we completely handed over all coding-related tasks to AI, and it went very well. I didn’t feel good about it at first. I’ve been coding for a long time, and that’s when I realized that coding is definitely dying out.
I haven’t coded since. That’s the new reality of my job. But just because an AI takes over my coding duties doesn’t mean I can play outside all day. I am still able and expected to produce the same level of output and quality of work. Even if the AI takes over some tasks, I sometimes feel like I’m burnt out because I’m expected to do more work.
I’m excited about AI and enjoy how it has changed my job
AI requires a lot of guardrails at the moment, but I believe my background and knowledge of systems is still quite useful.
There’s a lot of useless stuff like software architecture and design, so I’m glad I haven’t coded in three months. AI can help architects and designers, but today it requires a lot of human resources. So, at least for now, software engineering knowledge is more important than ever in the age of AI.
There’s also a lot of systems thinking that needs to be applied, but I love it and it’s perfectly aligned, so it’s good for me.
I’ve been coding for years, but at the end of the day it’s a means to an end. I never saw it as rocket science. However, there are many nuances to coding that can be frustrating and tiring to work with. So I’m enjoying this next era.
Thanks to AI, we can do more research, faster. This allows you to question your product decisions and think more than just doing. As an engineer, I was always under pressure to deliver, but now it frees me up to actually critique what project managers are doing. Because you can understand the decisions that are being made about the product. This has helped me take on a broader product engineering role, which I enjoy.
We’re happy to be able to deliver at this pace, as it wasn’t possible before. It’s great to be able to create a feature in a few days instead of a month. It’s a crazy change that makes me happy and excited.
I’m worried about the future
Even if you’re enjoying where you are right now, behind the scenes there’s always this thought of, “Okay, what’s next?” Technology is advancing every day. I feel uncomfortable with AI being left in a state where it continues to operate on its own. I don’t know what I would do in that scenario.
I find it strange that my job has changed so much. Sometimes I’m speechless. There are so many thoughts and emotions coming up. Most of it turned into excitement, but the more I thought about it, the more it turned into fear. These agents are so powerful that they were sometimes frightening.
I openly said in my company’s Slack that I would never be able to code anything 10% better than these agents in my lifetime. After all, if you look at a typical problem, most people, except for the 1% of geniuses, are no match for solving it.
Coding is a skill learned over time, and sometimes you feel defeated because it took you so much time to get to the point where you can do it well. It’s not that I don’t like change, but I do feel anxious.
What happens when all of this becomes fully automated and people just ask AI for things?