Something has changed

Take yourself back to when you got your first computer and started writing code. That sense of wonder when “Hello World” appeared on your screen. That dizzying feeling that you could make this strange machine do whatever you told it to. Turns out that tapping into that old feeling is really helpful again. Experiencing that sense of wonder while messing with all these new AI tools and getting your hands dirty building stuff is a much better use of your time than having preconceived opinions about them.

The mistake a lot of people make is treating the AI tools as a debate topic. None of those debates really matter though. For us software developers what really matters is that we now have to deal with new expectations. That is what is actually changing.

What felt like impressive software output two years ago can now be done much faster. Tasks that used to take days can often be pushed through in hours. Prototypes show up faster. Refactors get cheaper. Throwaway software to solve one-off annoying problems is now viable too. The cost of getting to plausible software has collapsed.

That does not mean every team is suddenly great, or that producing actually working software got easy. It does mean expectations are changing, and what feels “fast enough” is no longer the same. The real challenge right now is figuring out how to use the new tools to move faster without trashing quality. It changes how you work quite drastically and repaints the landscape of what is possible to do and where the bottlenecks are. As a developer you are now able to tackle problems all over the stack, all the way from product, dev tools to infrastructure.

That is the shift. Not just new tooling.

New expectations.