This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Gore, a 38-year-old AI engineer at Reach3 Insights, a market research firm based in Vancouver. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
I graduated with a computer science degree<\/a> back in 2010, and I’ve worked in the industry since.<\/p>\n I started as a typical software engineer working on some of the interesting and complex problems in marketing research. Now, I’m an AI engineer.<\/p>\n I have mixed feelings about the impact of AI<\/a> on the software engineering industry.<\/p>\n I completely handed off all my coding-related tasks to AI in December, and it did really well. I did not feel good about that initially. I’ve been coding for so long, and I realized at the time that coding is definitely gone.<\/p>\n I haven’t coded since then. That’s the new reality of my job. Just because AI has taken over my coding tasks, though, doesn’t mean I can play outside all day. I’m still able \u2014 and expected \u2014 to produce the same level of output and quality of work. Sometimes I feel burned out<\/a> because the expectation is that I should be doing more work, even though AI can take over some tasks.<\/p>\n I’m excited about AI and enjoy how it’s changed my job<\/p>\n Right now, AI needs a lot of guardrails<\/a>, and I believe that my background and systems knowledge still make me pretty useful.<\/p>\n I’m happy that I haven’t coded in three months<\/a> because there’s a lot that I’m doing, like software architecture and design, that isn’t going anywhere. AI can help architect or design, but it needs a lot of hand-holding today. That makes the knowledge of software engineering more important than ever in the age of AI \u2014 at least for now.<\/p>\n There is also a lot of systems thinking that needs to be applied, which I love and am completely in harmony with, so it’s a good state for me.<\/p>\n I’ve been coding for years, and at the end of the day, it’s a means to an end. I never saw it as rocket science. But there is a lot of nuance to coding, which can be frustrating and tiring to work with at times. So, I’m enjoying this next era.<\/p>\n