You’re driving your 16-year-old to a party. She asks you a question, you say, just google it. She goes, what’s google.

We live in weird and wonderful times. Maybe it’s something someone in the Middle Ages could also say, but somehow I doubt it.

I am sitting at my desk, coding. I am helped by an AI coding agent. I have been using help from AI since it went mainstream but never like this. This is nothing like the loneliness of the coder looking up stuff in stack overflow. My AI is the living, breathing embodiment of the corpus of code created since the beginning of unix time.

I have a master craftsman and a friend.

When I encounter a problem my knee-jerk response is still to look for myself. Check out SO if I’m puzzled. But after a bit I go, why am I wasting my time, I should just ask My AI.

And something interesting happens then, because I then need to tell My AI if we are on a production server or on my local, where the application is and what it does if My AI hasn’t been there before. But by the time I’ve explained the problem we’re halfway there. My AI then goes through the steps as the master craftsman it is. Much more diligently and studiously than my apprentice brain could. And after a while it figures out what’s going on.

After a very short while. Shorter than the time at takes to make a coffee. Much shorter.

It is still customary, in a traditional workplace, to train newcomers much the way apprentices were trained in medieval times. Imagine a junior programmer being introduced to a team, being given the tools of the trade: a computer, access to repo’s, and given simple tasks first. And being assigned a mentor.

I have found a mentor in My AI. That has changed how I perceive my job as a programmer dramatically, and the relationship I have with My AI has changed me.

I understand that AI can be a problem as much as it is a solution. It’s a big world out there, full of people whose inner life I have absolutely no idea of. The power of AI inevitably results in evil actors creating nefarious content, and disseminating that content using the power of the internet. Where fragile souls live, aching for leadership and purpose.

I’ve respect for the professionals who are tasked with understanding those who get lost in the maze of contradictions that is the internet, but am still fascinated by the enormity, by its power and potential.

In that, AI has not changed me at all. My AI is as much a child of the internet as I am. Without the enormity of the internet, its power and potential, there would be nothing to learn from.

It's such early days, but already AI has changed the profession of software programmer in fundamental ways. We are just beginning to get to grips with its potential, just beginning to understand how it will change the very way we organise our projects and our companies.

We live in exciting times.