I self-taught myself coding at a young age but I haven't had any identity crisis due to AI. I always saw myself as a software architect, not a coder.

When I was a junior learning to code, I would feel proud of myself because I could remember 100 lines of Windows API code needed to create a new window... But it's been decades since I understood that the real value is not in the code. It's in the architecture. As the author alludes to; the intuition behind the code is what counts.

I think highly competent engineers are often underappreciated because the really clever stuff they do doesn't appear clever at all; it looks deceptively simple. I think what people don't understand is that maintaining simplicity whilst requirements are becoming more complex, is very difficult.

So...software engineers become product managers? All of us? That's going to be an awful lot of product managers.

There’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.

And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.