Your Job as a Developer is Changing Faster than You Can Imagine

Pandora’s Box has been opened. AI is here.

The rate of change is accelerating. New developments are coming thick and fast. You’ve been thinking “will I still be doing this in 5 years?”.

Doom-mongers are screaming “software development is over”. Hype merchants are selling utopia.

Who will you listen to?

The World Still Belongs To The Builders

Shipping an AI demo is easy. Chain a few API’s, write a prompt, and you’re ready to go.

Right?

Wrong. You’ve seen the endless naive GenAI chatbots. They leak valuable IP, embarrass companies, and piss off customers with ludicrous hallucinations.

Getting AI right is hard. You need consistent results from an inconsistent tool. This is when most developers give up.

“I need a PhD in linear algebra.”

Nope.

The world needs builders. There are emerging techniques for getting better results from GenAI’s:

• Prompt Engineering
• Evals
• Observability
• Tracing
• RAG
• Agents

You don’t need to understand the low level complexities of pre-training models or hoard GPU’s to build with AI.

You can be an AI Engineer.

The AI Engineer builds applications and uses GenAI to deliver value to their team and their customers. You care about your users. You work with the state-of-the-art tools, patterns, and practices that get the job done.

You build.

Every Hero Needs A Guide

But how do you get from zero to hero? Especially when the world of AI is full of hype, nonsense and FOMO.

You need a filter. Keeping up with AI is a full-time job. I’ll keep out the crap, and give you only the good stuff.

You need a guide. You'll need to build and practice what you learn, starting small, and understanding how the skills of the AI Hero fit into the work you are doing today.

It won’t be simple. The ground beneath our feet is shifting all the time. But the rewards are immense.