Don't get left behind

When I was a child, I read the Left Behind graphic novels. The quick synopsis is that Christians around the world suddenly disappeared into heaven, and the rest of the world was left to deal with the end of the world. The story gave me nightmares of being left behind and alone. Similarly, I think there will be software engineers who get left behind due to the adoption of AI coding tools.

When GitHub Copilot came out, I was eager to try it but was easily disappointed in its capabilities. While it could get a few lines correct, most of the suggestions were off the mark. In my mind, AI was not ready to code, and I continued on with my work. Several months later, Instacart began to pilot Cursor internally, and I was lucky to get a spot in the pilot program. Cursor was definitely a leap forward from Copilot. While I was still primarily writing my own code, I began to trust Cursor with smaller tasks such as bug fixes and writing unit tests. Sometimes Cursor would excel on those small tasks but other times it would completely fail. One particular time, I tasked it to write unit tests but the tests it wrote failed. I’d ask Cursor to fix it, and it would fail again. Eventually I realized it’d be faster if I wrote the tests on my own. That made me lose trust in Cursor for a while, relegating it to a glorified code search. I grew quite skeptical of the AI coding hype and thought it could never outperform a senior engineer.

Fortunately, I turned to Claude for my side projects because I lacked expertise in React and frontend development in general. By Claude, I mean Claude desktop app chat…(this was before the general release of Claude code CLI). I found Claude to be a lot better at “one-shotting” my prompts, and I was able to build a few useful web applications. When Claude code launched, I could build and iterate faster than ever. Now, I have a solid software development workflow that allows me to go from an idea to a deployed feature within an hour.

My journey from AI coding agent skeptic to complete workflow change has me thinking what would have happened if I never tried Claude code. If I stuck to my mindset of AI not being able to produce useful output, where would I end up 5 or 10 years from now? While I think there will still be jobs that don’t allow or require the use of AI, most jobs, the exciting and high-paying ones, will probably require the knowledge and experience of using AI coding agents. That leaves each engineer the choice: adopt or fall behind. However, I would argue adopting new technology and continuous learning are a part of the job description for software engineering: whether it’s a new language, framework, or a whole new ideology that flips the software development lifecycle.