Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way.
Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers empowered by AI might feel those pesky nay-saying, opinionated engineers aren’t needed anymore. Engineers empowered with AI might feel like AI creates designs that are good enough for most situations. Backend engineers feel like frontend engineering is a solved problem. Frontend engineers know scaffolding a CRUD app or an entire backend API is simple fodder for the agent. Meanwhile, management cackles in their leather chairs saying “Let them fight…”
It reminds me of something Paul Ford said:
The most brutal fact of life is that the discipline you love and care for is utterly irrelevant without the other disciplines that you tend to despise.
Ah yes, that age-old mindset where you believe your discipline is the only one that really matters.
Paradoxically, the promise of AI to every discipline is that it will help bypass the tedious-but-barely-necessary tasks (and people) of the other pesky disciplines.
AI whispers in our ears: “everyone else’s job is easy except yours”.
But people matter. They always have. Interacting with each other is the whole point!
I look forward to a future where, hopefully, decision makers realize: “Shit! The best products come from teams of people across various disciplines who know how to work with each other, instead of trying to obviate each other.”