Tech Stories from a Human perspective.

I've remained subscribed to some newsletters for over 20 years. The authors managed to keep my attention all that time. But then, one day, they decided to switch to an AI-generated newsletter without making any announcement.

Whenever I saw someone type a natural language query into Google, it made me cringe. "It's not a person," I would say. "Type like you're talking to a machine." This was especially true for programmers and it was before AI took over everything.

Early in my career, a manager at one of the big firms where I worked made a request so absurd it remains etched in my memory. I walked back to the team, repeated what he had asked, and couldn't finish the story without laughing. He wanted me to create a pie chart, of lines of code, per developer, per week.

There he was, the man at the helm of innovation. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. The man who once said, google doesn't need to record your conversation, it already knows everything about you. Yet he didn't see this one coming. In his speech, he looked clear-eyed into the crowd of graduates and told them that AI is inevitable.

You know you've explained the same issue before in two or three different places, yet here they are asking again. Why don't they understand you? Why do they ask the same question when you've already given them the answer right there on Jira? Are they stupid? Lazy, maybe? Do they not take the time to read?

I can only imagine what it's like learning the skill of programming in this day and age. What does an average college class look like? What is the CS professor teaching? And students, how do you reconcile what you are learning vs the current job market?