Courtesy Doug Steinberg
Doug Steinberg, 46, is a software engineer who lives in Coral Springs, Florida. He isn’t worried that artificial intelligence will steal his job because he’s able to use it to be far more productive. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
In the last year or so, I’ve been using AI-assisted coding, and I’ve gotten really used to it. I don’t want to go back to the old way or be at a company that doesn’t think that you should be using it.
AI takes a lot of the load off of you. As an example, one thing that every developer has to do is make commit messages. You write some code, you do your work, and you save it, basically, to a checkpoint. You write a message about what you’re saving. It seems no one has ever really put a lot of effort into that. Now, you just say, “Hey, write me a good message,” and AI writes incredible, detailed comments.
In the past, you’d always see messages like “work in progress” or totally unusable stuff. Even if it was kind of useful, AI adds a lot more detail. Now, I never have to think about what I have to write for that. That’s only one tiny slice of the whole big picture with AI.
AI will make you better
Using AI, it almost feels like you have another person with you at all times that you can ask anything you need to or try to brainstorm with. Before, it was all on you. It’s crazy to me to think about going a day without using it, even though it’s only been a year or two since this came out.
I can write an entire app now in days, where before it would have taken me months. For example, my wife and I have a side business developing software for sales agencies in the lighting industry. We’re not using AI for it yet, but we plan to.
I started writing an app for our company back in 2023. It took me months. There’s a similar app, complexity-wise, that I made more recently for our daughter’s school to track volunteer hours, and, using AI, I made the thing in a few days. My wife says it’s like changing out your shovel for an excavator.
What really turned my thoughts about AI was when I discovered Claude Code. It seemed to do at least 5x better than anything I’d seen before. The first website I vibe-coded that actually worked out was for my wife’s company for a conference. In the past, they would just make a simple site to let people know about the event.
This time, I ended up making this whole conference platform where guests could register and get notified, manufacturers could register, and manufacturers could scan guests’ name tags to see who visited their booth.
Without AI, I would have never invested the amount of time it would take to build a thing like that. It would have easily been a couple of weeks. In this case, I got it up and running in just a few days, and looking really nice.
AI can do visual design way better than I can. That’s not something I’m good at, and it can make things look pretty decent. If I were good at design, it could probably make things look amazing. I’m good at software development, but AI will make you better at what you’re good at.
Amplifying productivity
Software engineers work for companies that build software, and their whole thing is they want to keep on putting out features as fast as they can and doing things for their customers. I just see AI amplifying it. I see there being more features — faster and better.
Ultimately, the customers are going to get more out of whatever tools they have. In some cases, maybe they’ll think they don’t need some software products anymore because they can just do it themselves. Honestly, I still think it’s going to be a net-positive. As a maker, I’m not afraid of people like me being negatively impacted.
When it comes to my career, I think the only reason I’m any good is because I had to go through all that pain to learn how things actually work. If I didn’t have to do that, I don’t know if I would have had the discipline to actually learn it. If you don’t really know how things work, you’re not going to get that far. It’s going to be a house of cards that will eventually fall over.
It’s possible that companies won’t need as many people, but I’m not that worried about it because I can make things and could make money on my own. I’ve always wanted to make my own apps, but I’ve never had enough time or been fast enough to do it.
Now, it’s almost like you have another you. You can give it a prompt, walk away, and come back later, and this whole feature is built. There’s just never been anything like it.
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