Member-only story
Dear developer, are you one AI model away from being replaced?
From nerdy excitement to existential dread, LLMs evoke so many emotions in developers. Is one of them fear? Should you be worried about your job?
Once a nerd
My day job is as a software engineer.
I design and build software and lead a team of people who do just the same. I don’t work at a FAANG or one of “the big” banks, so I certainly don’t think of myself as any kind of subject matter expert on anything in particular. I’m just a guy who really, really loves software.
As a child of the 80s, I grew up around what could be thought of as the first wave of home computers. My childhood best friend was — for better or worse — a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga 500 (followed by the awesomely powerful Amiga 2000HD — 52MB of hard drive storage! Pwhoar.)
I started experimenting with code when I was around 10 years old. At first it was C64 Basic following arcane instructions sets laid out in cassette tape adorned magazines like ZZap64! and later on the Amiga using long since dead languages like AMOS.
My early teenage nights were spent leaving my Amiga on overnight to render frame after slow frame of seemingly impossible landscapes using Vista fractal generators. Better than any alarm clock was the lure of waking first thing in the morning to find the meagre 30 frames of animation had finished calculating, my reward a 10 second ‘flythrough’ of a mountain landscape.
I think I was fated to go into a career in technology. From the moment a Commodore 64 appeared — with all the mystery of childhood Christmas — under the tree, I was hooked.
I enjoy my job, a lot. I’m one of those people who feels blessed because whatever it is I’m doing in my day job I’d get a great deal of enjoyment out of doing “just because”. That’s a rare…
