If I were to rewrite the calendar like Pope Gregory and Ceaser, I would divide the epochs into pre-LLM and post-LLM eras. Life before ChatGPT (and Covid) is vastly different from life today.
I remember advising upcoming software engineers that, in this field, nobody cares about your soft skills. You ought to fill your resume with hard technical skills to show employers what you can really do. Nobody, I argued, cared about your communication and conflict-resolving skills as much as they wanted to know whether you can ship functional code, optimise a database, or debug a complex system.
That advice was perfectly sound for the pre-LLM world. Employers needed people who could sit in a corner, translate business requirements into Python or Java, and push it to production. Raw coding ability was sufficient.
I recently interviewed for a role where I was provided with an AI coding assistant that I was free to refer to during the technical assessment. Remember when, during code interviews, you were given a marker pen and were to write the perfect solution extemporaneously on a whiteboard? Back then, mastery of syntax and algorithms was your professional moat.
But as Bob Dylan so prophetically sang, the times, indeed, they are a-changing. Two of my skills that I’ve spent decades acquiring, writing and coding, have since been usurped by AI, which does them faster and, in most instances, even better.
I was pondering on this when I came across an article by CTO Yue Zhao where she described 3 centres of wisdom: the Head, the Heart, and the Gut.
In my early career, the tech industry exclusively worshipped the Head. You went on Codility and practised data structures and algorithms daily. “A LeetCode a day keeps unemployment away”, a popular saying went. Now, AI is the smartest entity in the room. It has ingested every repository on GitHub and every documentation page ever written. The Head is no longer a differentiator. It is merely the baseline.
This brings us to the Heart and the Gut, where AI still struggles to replicate.
The Heart represents connection and empathy. Those soft skills I used to tell juniors to leave off their resumes are now the most critical tools we have. AI cannot sit down with a confused stakeholder, read their frustration, and figure out what product they actually need. It cannot mediate a dispute between two devs stubbornly arguing over an architectural choice.
The Gut is our ethical compass and instinct. It is the intuition that tells you a certain system architecture feels brittle before a single line of code is written. AI lacks the capacity to make moral judgements. It will build exactly what you ask it to build, with little nuance. The Gut is what allows an engineer to say no, to hold the line on quality, and to foresee downstream consequences.
Do we still have room for an engineer like me, who still believes there’s value in knowing how to manually configure a Kubernetes cluster, even though AI can now do the same task on the fly?