Take a moment to think about who it is you want to be. Is this really where you are heading?
AI is a force multiplier
I’ve heard this many times, notably from @theprimeagen, ex Netflix BTW, who is an excellent engineer that I take a lot of inspiration from. I’ve really started seeing this play out with the various people I work with and myself. Now more than ever we need to consider these personality traits as we try to build out our teams, hire and backfill. We need to think about where we want to see this team and what type of person is really going to get us there, what people we have on the team and what gaps we need to fill.
The Prolific Prototyper #
The ones who were able to knock out entire projects in a week are able to do this in an afternoon. They are able to ship early and often and get something in the hands of users as fast as they ask for it. Code quality, reliability, observability thrown into the wind, we are lookng for features shipped, actionable use cases implemented same day. This is the type of guy that already knows the product and business well, He can spot the flaws in the output and steer the agent to success in just a few turns.
I’ve found myself here on a few projects, and it led to building out a very complex system overnight that was quite hard to vet, nervewracking to open up to start allowing new users in.
This person is not thinking about the code at all anymore, they’ve elevated themself to a higher level, concerning themselves with solving real business problems given the constraints handed to them.
The Manic Engineer #
This person can’t go to sleep with a good idea still in their head, they cant just write it down, they need a prototype, they need to *feel the output that it creates.
What used to be a phase here in there of late nights and weekends has turned into months of ideas flowing freely creating ideas that are almost always nearly complete but not quite ready, only one more all nighter 💫 and things will be in a good place.
This person is constantly climing feature mountain, getting dopamine hits from each new peak they hit so hard that it fuels them into the next 10 peaks they have spotted from the summit of the last feature. Only to be hit with a complete crashing low point as they realize none of it is just how they want it. They want it all just right before really hitting production, but there’s always more to add before shipping.
AI has enabled this person to keep projects moving at all hours of the day. This person is not necessrily token-maxxing they are feature maxxing, not stopping until their projects are complete. AI has allowed this person to think that the project will be complete in only a few more days perpetually.
The I'll do it **myself** #
This person has always struggled with taking on more than they can chew because the exiting tech out there is just not quite good enough for them. It’s not configurable enough or too complex. It’s not written in their favorite language or deployed on their infra of choice.
This person has taken on an unhealthy amount of side projects. At this point the problem is so bad they have stopped even looking for existing solutions, stopped looking at the hacker news feed, github feed, twitter feed. Everything is now AI slop and nothing will be how they want it anyways so they might as well just make everything they need for themself. What does battle tlkested even mean anymore if its all changed on vibes anyways?
The skeptical perfectionist #
This person cares deeply about code quality and architecture. They are spending an extra month on project setup making sure that every line is linted and type checked. Secrets are spotted and removed before commit. CI does all the testing and automation anyone could ever want. A full management suite is developed for every project to handle its rollouts investigate issues.
This person is calculated and calls the process agentic engineering. They have a skill for every possible case.
AI has enabled this person to completely grease of the deployment and obvervability of
The crypto nft ai agentic bro #
This person cannot close linkedIn or twitter they are constantly scrolling looking for the next dopamine hit while their agents are cooking. They are the first one in the chat, A is the best model ever, A is dead to me after the release of B, C has been out for 5 minutes why are you even thinking about B, I have D orchestrate loops using E, F, and G models. They have the new best skill, agent, harness, every single day. You know this because they are posting about the new 🔥hottest thing constantly on twitter, even though its only been out 2 hours they know everything about it and when to lean on it.
This person contributes almost nothing meaningful to the projects that need done. They have rewrote the .github directory 12 times this week
The White Paper Nerd #
This person is so deep into reading deep technical topics they don’t even notice the ai hype cyle right now, they maybe do a few prompts here and there to generate a helper script, but its not touching real work, its not ingesting docs, and it’s definitely not replacing this persons ability to think.