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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Gore, a 38-year-old AI engineer at Reach3 Insights, a market research firm based in Vancouver. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.I graduated with a computer science degree back in 2010, and I've worked in the industry since.I started as a typical software engineer working on some of the interesting and complex problems in marketing research. Now, I'm an AI engineer.I have mixed feelings about the impact of AI on the software engineering industry.I completely handed off all my coding-related tasks to AI in December, and it did really well. I did not feel good about that initially. I've been coding for so long, and I realized at the time that coding is definitely gone.I haven't coded since then. That's the new reality of my job. Just because AI has taken over my coding tasks, though, doesn't mean I can play outside all day. I'm still able — and expected — to produce the same level of output and quality of work. Sometimes I feel burned out because the expectation is that I should be doing more work, even though AI can take over some tasks.Right now, AI needs a lot of guardrails, and I believe that my background and systems knowledge still make me pretty useful.I'm happy that I haven't coded in three months because there's a lot that I'm doing, like software architecture and design, that isn't going anywhere. AI can help architect or design, but it needs a lot of hand-holding today. That makes the knowledge of software engineering more important than ever in the age of AI — at least for now.There is also a lot of systems thinking that needs to be applied, which I love and am completely in harmony with, so it's a good state for me.I've been coding for years, and at the end of the day, it's a means to an end. I never saw it as rocket science. But there is a lot of nuance to coding, which can be frustrating and tiring to work with at times. So, I'm enjoying this next era.AI also lets me do a lot more research, and faster. It allows me to question product decisions and think more, rather than just execute. As an engineer, I was constantly under delivery pressure, but now it frees me up and actually allows me to critique what a project manager is doing, because I understand the product decisions that are being made. It helps me take on a broader product engineering role, which I'm enjoying.I'm feeling happy that I can deliver at this pace, because that wasn't possible earlier. It's cool that I can make a feature in two or three days instead of a month. That's a crazy transformation that I feel happy and excited about.Even though I'm enjoying the current state, there's always this behind-the-scenes thought of, "Ok, what's next?" The technology is getting better every day. I'm not comfortable with AI being in a state where it can run on its own forever. I don't know what I would do in that scenario.It feels weird that the job has changed so much. Sometimes I find myself speechless. I have so many thoughts and emotions going on. Most of them have turned into excitement, but the more I think about it, the more it turns into fear. Sometimes I felt intimidated because these agents are so powerful.I even openly said in my company's Slack that there's no way in my lifetime I could've coded something even 10% as good as these agents. At the end of the day, if you look at a typical problem, most humans are no match for solving them, unless you're talking about the 1% geniuses.Sometimes I feel defeated because coding was a skill I acquired over time and it took a lot of time to get to a state where I could do that well. It's not that I don't like the change, but there's a fear there.What happens if all of this gets completely automated and people just ask AI for things?
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