Technical folks struggle to find the signal in the noise, and many business brains get swept away by the hype (and by Zuckerberg's aspirational announcements... thanks, Zuk). There are a few common archetypes that have emerged:

There's the AI-ate-my-job developer, the one-with-the-vibe junior, the embrace-ai-or-get-out CEO, the cathedral-building anti-slop senior, the vc-funding-focused entrepreneur, and the not-on-my-watch IT gatekeeper. There are also people who seem to be doing things very sensibly, but it's worth looking closely at the extremes - there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid, and wisdom to be adapted and adopted (#steal-like-an-engineer).

There are clear benefits to fast iteration and quick prototypes, and adopting LLM tools on complex brown-field projects often has mixed results. It's worth knowing about the (shifting) limitations of these tools, and the emerging best practices (which often look a lot like the best practices that emerged in the before-times). It is worthwhile to deeply consider safety-nets and guard-rails as we lean on these tools, we need to iterate on our approach to engineering rather than focusing on writing more code faster (LOC is a bad measure of productivity, we know this!)

The other thing we really need to think about and solve for as a community is: how do we play the long game? I'm pretty convinced that we will still need human software engineers for a long time to come, and good ones at that. Skill comes from experience, and the junior developer job market is a bit of a dog show.

How should junior devs prepare for the future? And how should organisations adapt so that they have people that they can rely on 5 years from now? I have some opinions...