Moving on From Here

I like to think of "using AI tools" as "managing AI tools". They can do a lot for us, and I never expect anything other than a mediocre result, unless I'm specific about what I want to see and how I want to see it.

These are the skills you need to cultivate as this new frontier unfolds before us. Specifically, you'll need to:

• Learn what code to write, when. I think a familiar phrase in the future might be "you wrote this by hand? Why?
• Become a manager of people that need to learn the above skill. This is an exponential leverage point! Code reviews will become prompt reviews, to a certain extent, and interviews will also have a prompting component. Weird world, I know.
• Become "technically creative", meaning that we're still discovering what AI can do for us, and it's a wild, wild frontier. It honestly feels like the dawn of the web all over again, which shook the foundation of business to the core. What can AI do that we haven't thought of? So, so many things…

Play. Have Fun.

One of the ways you can exercise your creative mind is to have a look at the "help wanted" issues on GitHub for your favorite projects, or maybe a project that a friend has.

Open an issue and make sure you let them know you'll be using AI to help with the process. They might have a strong reaction to that, or, hopefully, they'll be open to it. Either way: give it a try, even if their initial response is negative.

See what you can do with small steps and natural curiosity. Be creative, think sideways, ask your LLM what choices you have to make the fix.

Who knows? Maybe the fix will be so elegant that the maintainer might take it anyway. Don't be pushy, of course, but fixing or improving a thing is a drug to many maintainers, and they might be extremely grateful, and also a bit shocked.

That's the point: have as much fun as you can, and see what happens.

Thank You 🤙🏻

I do hope you've enjoyed this workshop. The unknown is always scary, to be sure, and this is about as unknown as it gets. If we focus on the positive, however, we might surprise ourselves!

Good luck to you and your company!

A hui hou,

Rob