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Hey, I agree with you. I and my team have the same existential worries. This was one reason why I bought my own subscriptions to Claude and Codex to learn and skill up. I have been using that to intensively do side projects, curating prompts and workflows to see how these new tools fit in my toolbox. I have been bringing back the learnings to my team so that they can upskill as well. For context, I use Claude and Codex (side projects, Max and Pro plans respectively) and Gemini at work. The key takeaway I have is: These tools have let me climb up the value chain ladder. Even with Claude (Max plan, Opus 4.8, High Effort), it makes tons of mistakes, assumes a lot, misses nuance and doesn't really think through every aspect of the problem from every angle. Limited memory, lack of full context and a lack of experience with real world distributed systems means that the initial solutions they offer need a lot of iteration and refinement. Just like any junior engineer would need to do. So, you might feel that with a LLM, "this should just be an hour" but it usually becomes a 2-week exercise for me. Which brings me to what I tell my team repeatedly: "the only person with the big picture is you." I ask them to focus on thinking, ideating, refining. Do quick PoCs, talk to customers, discern what they are trying to achive, and what you can do to solve those problems. Work with Gemini (we can only use Gemini at work) to iterate until you are comfortable with the full solution end to end with all the nuances. Then let the agent code. This moves you up the value chain from being a programmer to a problem solver. That's what software engineering has always been about: solving problems. Don't be discouraged. In fact, I am having more fun, am more energized and loving my craft even more now with LLMs. I am able to write down my thoughts, iterate on them and create a one-pager for ideas fast and get them to my team for them to think about. Sure, probably half of them we discard because it's usually not a "now" problem but we put that in our backlog to dust off when the first customer asks for it. |
Problem-solving can be done by an "analyst" or whatever these types of jobs are usually called.