Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
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 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?
I didn't watch Star Wars when it was released. I wasn't even born. By the time we popped the cassette tape in the VCR, it was at least 15 years old. But I liked the movie all the same. It was not my favorite film by any means, but it was memorable. The first time you see Darth Vader appear on screen, you know this villain is not going to be easy to defeat. "Villain" because no one needs to tell you who the good guys and bad guys are in this movie. The visuals, the voices, the music, everything tells you that Darth Vader and the Empire are up to no good.
In my first interview for a developer position, I shared a link to my personal project with the interviewer. It was a website for learning how to program. I created it from the ground up. I built the PHP app, designed the database schema, made a nice design to tie it all together. I wrote down my process, and it became the first tutorial on the site. Then I collected tutorials from all over the web and displayed them on my website, which acted as a portal.
On one hand, I know a developer producing 30,000 lines of code a month. On the other, I know a developer who says AI is stupid. Each swears by their stance and has evidence to back it up. One has a working product and the other has a broken one.
I'm at home, sitting on the kitchen table. I just took my boys to school and I'm about to start my work. I'm writing this message directly to you. And you are reading it. Hello!
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were designed as universal constraints for any thinking machine powerful enough to harm us:
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent: "Why did you delete it when you were told never to perform this action?" Then he tried to parse the answer to either learn from his mistake or warn us about the dangers of AI agents.
How is it possible that a feature I use every day, in an app I rely on daily, entirely offline, just disappeared from my phone? I use a fitness app. My metrics, such as steps, workout routines, heart rate, are collected from a wearable device like a smartwatch and sent to the app via Bluetooth. No third-party servers are involved in that transaction. The data lives on the phone. It costs the developer nothing to maintain, because there's nothing to maintain on their end.
