Mentorship

Two things crossed my feed recently, which caught my attention and were related to a few of my recent posts. The first was Fata, a spaced-repetition app with a blunt pitch: fight “skill rot from AI coding.” I’m not promoting Fata (or similar tools) necessarily but I found the concept interesting. The second was a Hacker News thread with more than 1,000 points where developers were asking, half-seriously, whether they should go back to a local model for daily coding because the friction might keep them sharper. The underpinning of both is the same. We can all feel certain skills quietly atrophying… ...

Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman recently published a paper in Communications of the ACM called “Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI.” Their central question is what happens to early-in-career engineers when AI changes the shape of the job? Their thesis is straightforward. Generative AI acts as what they call “seniority-biased technological change.” It gives a massive boost to engineers who already know where to draw boundaries, what to watch for in production, and how to tell good output from plausible output. Engineers who haven’t built that intuition yet are left trying to steer something they don’t fully understand. ...