Image generated with ChatGPT.
Following this reflection that I published the other day, I received a response that I did not see coming. Fernando Delgado, a programmer with whom I had the pleasure of working for several years and whose opinion I always hold in high regard, told me the following:
I believe the article is written from your perspective, as a freelancer. You really don’t have a work schedule, and when you “want” you do something else. I have to put in 8 hours, and the problem is if during that time I only have to press enter.
My first reaction was to think that it wasn’t that different. I dedicate a workday to my clients and do my projects outside of it, just like someone who works for a company could. But, upon reflection, I think he was responding to something else.
If I manage to finish a job early, I have some leeway to decide what to do with that time. Not always, because being self-employed doesn’t mean doing whatever you want, but I can reorganize, make progress on something else, or propose an improvement to a client. Fernando may have finished what he had to do and still have several hours of work ahead of him. And perhaps he cannot decide how to spend that time. Here we could open the discussion on whether it makes sense to continue having fixed schedules, but I’ll leave that for another time.
Seen this way, I understand his comment better. Having a tool that saves you work can be quite frustrating if afterwards you have to sit and watch time pass.
These days I have read dozens of variations of the same sentiment. I stand by what I said in my last article, but so many opposing opinions have made me wonder why I am experiencing it with much more enthusiasm than many of my colleagues.
I think part of the explanation lies in how I have always enjoyed this profession. I have liked programming, but the eureka moment usually came when I managed to get an application to solve a real problem, when a client could do something that was previously impossible for them, or when a process stopped being a torment. Finishing the implementation of a design pattern could give me satisfaction, of course, although what interested me most was what I would be able to build with it.
When I transitioned from programming in Basic to Pascal, then to C, later to Visual Basic, then to Java, PHP, or TypeScript, I found tools that expanded my ability to do those things. With AI, I am feeling something similar, although the change is quite strange: now I can delegate a good part of a task that I personally did for years.
This is how I enjoy this profession: creating. Twenty years ago I did it one way, and now I do it in a way that I could hardly have imagined. Fortunately, I still interact with people, which is what I like most, and I can provide a technical and business perspective that helps them improve their processes.
But that explains my enthusiasm. I have no reason to assume that it will compensate the same for someone else.
Dan Greenheck, a developer and educator specialized in Three.js, expressed it in this message:
I’ve always enjoyed working on hard problems. Naturally, outsourcing the hard part to an agent takes away a lot of the enjoyment for me. High-level orchestration of agents does not tickle my brain in any special way.
He also spoke about the boredom at the end of the day and the feeling of losing concentration and critical thinking since he had stopped programming.
I completely understand that feeling. You have dedicated years to a profession you like, and suddenly, the part you enjoyed the most is done by an agent. Being able to produce more does not solve that problem. I still find satisfaction in what I do, but I understand that for others, the change may feel uninspiring.
It must also be disconcerting to have spent years building a tool, refining every detail, creating a community, and finding that now “it seems” anyone can clone it. Be careful, I said “it seems” because I don’t believe that reproducing its functions equates to reproducing all the work behind it. Just like a car coming off a production line is not the same product as one made by hand. Not necessarily better or worse, but different, and I understand that some may also value the process of building it.
In my case, there are many things that were previously unfeasible that are now feasible. For example, in recent weeks I have been creating dashboards for very specific cases, sometimes for teams of five or six people. The cost of doing them by hand would have discouraged implementation, but if I can build them using agents, the scenario changes radically.
I am also documenting more than ever, improving administrative interfaces that no one touched because, after all, people already knew how to do things. Sure, but now, thanks to AI, with very little effort you can achieve many micro-impacts. These are tasks that were previously left pending because it never made sense to tackle them, and now I am able to address them. I still have to understand what people need and think about how to solve it, which is a part of the job that I have always enjoyed.
Decades ago, a friend started an internship at Endesa. A few days later, he identified a process that could be automated, saving several hours a day. There was no AI, but since he was a smart guy, he found a way to solve it. When Manolo told me about it, I remember his satisfaction with the optimization he had achieved, not so much for the construction process.
I have no idea how all this will end. Will we find ourselves without jobs, will we have to set up a farm, will we need to retrain as plumbers? For now, we have a tool that is allowing me to build solutions that were previously out of my reach, at least with the time and resources we had. Ignoring it or trying to deny it still seems like a bad decision if we want to continue developing software.
But using it also does not guarantee that we will enjoy work more. Fernando made me see that I was assuming a margin of decision that not everyone has. I can find another problem to dedicate myself to. He may have to deal with boredom or watch his motivation slowly fade away.
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