Like most people I go through eb and flow of inspiration. I kinda left mobile not being inspired and not seeing a career path forward. I do a lot in Devops/Platform engineering stuff because I really enjoy it and get inspired by the challenges to automate or build custom things for teams downstream. Somewhere along my journey in the past few years I stopped building software though. Yes, I have a homelab but building software isn't the same of deploying software. I'm 100% sure it had to do with my work situation, but now that my career doesn't feel like it's choking me out, I'm going back to my original hobby of coding. I've been talking about testing out AI in different forms because I was an anti-AI-er at one point. I'm not crazy enough to ignore what's going on in my field long term though. Nowadays my AI "stack" is Chatgpt for rubber ducky, Gemini for code errors, and Cursor to write the bulk of the code. Compared to most people this probably seems fairly simple. I'm not hosting anything local and I'm not putting AI in every area of my life. I'm still pretty skeptical, but I do want to make sure I know how to use this tool long term since it's not going away. ## What have you learned? I say it all the time but computers are dumb. lol On the other side of that I know how to google for what I want, but I don't know how to prompt and that's a problem. You have to be clear when prompting. Give context, talk about what your trying to do, and honestly just talk to the agent/system/whatever like a toddler your teaching a lesson to. Given my background I'm used to looking for things and there being little info on it (I was doing android in 2012). Now I should/can trust that the AI can go out there and tldr all the things for me so that I can make an informed decision, and create the prompt needed accomplish my goal. I won't say I'm the best at prompting but I'm definitely starting to get better by relating it to how I would google something. ## Will you ever go back to non-AI building? I'm not sure. I still find value in writing things myself and looking at docs. The reality is that I'm at a high enough level in my career that I finally understand the "I don't have the time to ponder deeply as much any more". I like that I'm basically saying "do x with these requirements" and essentially doing a PR review for every feature. I have to take a small break here and say I've probably never written test when I code, but I've found myself demanding test and write more prompts like I'm doing TDD. Something I could do at work, but never spent time on personally. To sound like a broken record, leaning on AI makes it faster and easier for my ideas to become reality. I don't have a bunch of uncompleted projects on my computer. I'm at least getting to V1.0 before I pivot to the next thing. ## How does this affect your career? Well I'm not a developer anymore. I bring my developer self and mind to work every day because that's my biggest value add to my team, but past that I don't have an answer there. AS for Devops/SRE/Platform Engineering. I think RAGs will change the game. Knowing how to write well so there is solid documentation to train these internal AI systems on is key. I find value in this space of having AI analyze ansible, terraform, etc. errors and telling me how to fix it or point me to the documentation around it. I think it allows you to move faster in troubleshooting which is exciting. Troubleshooting can be difficult and I think that if we can make it easier then it allows the company as a whole to move faster. As your favorite behind the scenes person I think I'll be deploying complex systems and asking AI to document based on my documentation as code more than anything over the next few years. --- ## Recent things I'm building ### Condex If you follow me on LinkedIn I made a phonebook app based on an idea of my friend Keenan. I'm not sure what finally got me to try this out but it was a great experience to see my personal limits of AI. Building this was pretty frustrating because I don't think I prompted well nor do I think the right documentation was being used. Well once I got myself semi-up to speed on NextJS I think things became easier. The "PRs" got easier because I knew what I was looking for based on the request I made. I'm not sure where I see this app going in the future but it got me back in the game. ### Medical Notes I've had an Android app out for years that allows people to make "notes" on medical events. This app was really just something I needed back in 2019. I built it in flutter and never migrated it. Now I need it again and I want a local as well as cloud backend people can opt into. I'm using Cursor to convert my working flutter idea into a web app that is once again written in NextJS. If the web launch goes well I'll be looking to rebuild the mobile version and I'll release the android apk on my antifactory instance. Not sure I can promise you anything on ios at this time.