The AI adoption discourse has gotten a bit out of hand.
My feeds are full of grand statements about the rate of AI adoption - how you’re already behind if you’re not managing a swarm of 10,000 agents.
This is hyperbole at best, and straight-up lying in most cases. Nobody knows where this is going, so how does anyone know if you are behind? What are you behind in?
Engineering fundamentals still matter. Proper coding still matters. As software engineers, our job isn’t just to build something that works - it’s to build something that lasts.
You are not behind. Wherever you are on your journey with AI in software engineering, that’s the right place to be. The entire world is still learning how to use this technology and how to use it effectively. Some have found improvements; others are still searching.
I’m currently on my third iteration of my own personal workflow.
My first vibe-coding setup built something that worked. But it quickly reached the point where not understanding the code myself, having to rely on the AI to read, debug, and maintain it, became untenable. I was spending the same amount of time, or sometimes more, going back and forth with prompts as I would doing my own bugfixes in a codebase I wrote and understood myself.
My second iteration took a more guarded, spec-driven approach: applying architectural guidelines before starting implementation, and setting up an automated system of spec writing and spec implementation with fully integrated context in a greenfields repo. The result was closer to what I’d consider a robust codebase. But after a while, I realised I’d spent about the same amount of time in setup as I usually would — and even after some weeks, with an acceptable codebase, I wasn’t significantly closer to shipping something. In that case, AI probably gave me about a 30% speed boost. Useful, but not astounding.
I’m now trying a different approach. Paying more attention to the context I give my agent about who or what I am, and the principles I use when writing code, storing that in context and trying out spec driven development with these principles as a foundation.
What matters is that I’m still trying. I don’t have the answer - and neither does anyone else. Because software engineering isn’t really a question that has an answer, it’s a field of many quirks with many different answers. Anyone who says it does doesn’t really understand what software engineering is, or how it works.
Do you need to learn how to use AI? Yes I think so.
Do you need to be scared of falling behind? I don’t think so, not if you are still trying and learning things. The fundamental principle of growth mindset still applies, if you are trying and failing, you’re progressing.