Accepting GenAI

My Blacklist of Technologies
When I started out as a Java developer, I wanted to know everything about Java. I wanted to know all libraries and all frameworks. What a silly idea. Clearly Java or software development in general was and still is way too vast to know everything. Beginning 2003, I started ignoring certain technologies. I maintained a black list of topics and libraries, e.g. I decided to ignore all Java web frameworks. Later I ignored EJBs and then I added the whole Spring ecosystem to this list. While I knew these things existed and I had a working knowledge for my day job, I would refuse to study them in my personal free time. There was nothing wrong with these technologies. I did not find them interesting. Using that approach, I successfully skipped all the rage about SOA and other hypes, and I am not looking back. ;-) Explicitly ignoring topics helped me to focus on the things which I liked and considered important.

Scary or Awesome or What
And then ChatGPT came out. (The Wikipedia link is probably unnecessary.) There was an extreme buzz around it, and because of that I wanted to ignore it. A few months later I worked with a group of interns at one of my clients. These young people were enthusiastic about AI - most of them paid for pro versions from their own money - and they encouraged me to look into it. And so I did. And I got frightened. I enjoyed every post that diminished LLMs as stochastic parrots. Let's face it, isn't it weird when a machine can have a conversation with you? I am full of awe, also in a scared way - I am unsure what the right word is to describe my feeling.

Since last year, all of my clients ask for workshops to improve their coding with the use of AI. Code assistants and agents - augmented coding - get better and better. And sometimes the results are surprising. In the end, it is the same if AI works for coding or not - the industry has already decided on its adoption. For some time, I tried to deny it. But after Dave Farley's study about developers using AI, there was more denying it. I had to accept that AI will take over coding. (Dave Farley's video is 12 minutes, without hype, and in the end he gives a clear direction to follow. You should watch it.)

Fear of Obsolescence
Software development is changing quickly, and many of our skills become worthless (says Kent Beck). I read somewhere that "every technological revolution has displaced skills that people spent years mastering" and that "the people that are really skilled, have a lot of room to fall." (says Bryan Seegmiller). Yes, I feel like that. Coding is more than my work (and my fun), it is my identity. I have been playing with code since more than 40 years now. During this time, I have even established habits to use coding for relaxation, and I like exploring topics around code. I do not mean development, I particularly mean coding. I am the Code Cop and I am obsessed with manipulating the textual structure, improving its readability, exploring symmetries, tweaking it, moving it around like clay, and so on. And now all this is going away and it is scaring the hell out of me.

How am I dealing with all of this?
A senior developer from one of my clients, struggling with AI adoption himself, asked me how I am dealing with all of this? I am not, or at least not well. I thought about moving into areas where AI is useless and uncommon (yet?). For example, a study showed that AI is less effective on COBOL and other legacy code. Lovely! I bought a bunch of COBOL courses, and planned to take them. I had several other ideas, too, none of them really helped me till now. The core goal of this post was to list a few resources which really helped me:

• Maybe the first step is accepting the use of GenAI.
  
  
• I highly recommend this podcast with Grady Booch about the third golden age of software engineering. Grady Booch's approach is historical and more systemic. He is calm, with good perspective. It is 80 minutes long, audio-only is enough. This is the first piece that helped me to a more positive attitude.
  
  
• Kent Beck, who probably lost more to the rise of augmented coding than anybody, is lovely. In his conversation with Trisha Gee about Skills Developers Need to Have in an AI Future, they talk about developers losing confidence that they will be able to learn the next set of necessary skills. How true.
  
  
• Embrace Change is the second principle of the Agile Manifesto. While I try to stay clear of processes and am okay whether we use waterfall or Scrum or whatever, I do care about the code, and I favour Embracing Change there, designing in a way that would allow changes. Keeping software soft. Recently I was reminded of that fact by a fellow technical coach. So let's embrace change, even if it is frightening right now.
  
  
• Last month Kent Beck started a new podcast Still Burning where he has honest conversation about what it actually feels like to work in this moment - the fear, the uncertainty, the quiet disorientation of tools changing faster than understanding can follow.. The acknowledgement of these feelings, the disorientation, this is balm for my soul. I have always admired Kent Beck and the podcast setup is so grounded (actual fire, real smoke, Kent is coughing) and humble, it is already a classic.

What Next
These discussions helped me, and I hope they will help you, too. Am I done? I stay critical of using AI, its effects on me, my skills and the world in general. At the same time I try to board the AI train and follow along with the current. There are plenty opportunities to participate in AI experiments right now. Hopefully that will be enough to stay on the topic. My fear of missing out is real, I spend too much time with Generative AI. My wife already urges me to take a break from all this. It is exhausting. Everywhere it is just "AI", "AI", "AI".