“You are as good as your training”.

Generally, I would be able to finish this topic right after this phrase. But, I believe, it will be honest if I follow my own advice and will do the hard thing.

I am writing this topic in January 2025, around 2 years into 6 months after which I will be replaced with AI. I remember in 2015, when I was still in university everybody was telling me that developers are about to be replaced with no-code. Lucky for me I only started doing code for money in 2018. And about that 6 months in previous 2 years, I had a job, get laid off and found a new job again.

At this moment you might ask yourself “What is this guy trying to say?”. I am saying, that you will be as good as you’re willing to actually do the hard things for you. How much are you willing to admit your mistakes and keep going. Try, fail and try again. If you will endure for long enough you will succeed. There are no shortcuts for learning, you need to do a hard thing -the one, which you don’t want to do - because that’s your learning point.

We are currently on the fast hype train of AI. “Developers will be replaced”, “people getting 50% more productive with Copilot”, “writing code is in the past”. This and many other slogans I hear everyday from every corner. And to be honest, I simply can’t understand them. People, who claim to be 20, 40, 50% more productive with LLMs look like either liars or on copium to me. A recent example of mine was with GitHub Copilot. I wanted to write a CI job, which checks changed files in PR, compares them with list of files from .rubocop_todo.yml (I am a Ruby developer, btw) and leaves a small comment, that maybe you would like to fix this offences, you change a files anyways. I spent quite a time explaining it what I want and still needed to write bash by myself.

And no, AI is not going to serve you as a fast train to success. If you just stop learning and will be just prompting you will be as good as AI allows you, but if you keep learning you will be able to be better and still receive help from it. At the end of the day you are just as good as your training.