I was an engineer before moving to more product and strategy oriented roles, and I work on side projects with assistance from Copilot and Roo Code. I find that the skills that I developed as a manager (like writing clear reqs, reviewing code, helping balance tool selection tradeoffs, researching prior art, intuiting when to dive deep into a component and when to keep it abstract, designing system architectures, identifying long-term-bad ideas that initially seem like good ideas, and pushing toward a unified vision of the future) are sometimes more useful for interacting with AI devtools than my engineering skillset.
I think giving someone an AI coding assistant is pretty bad for having them develop coding skills, but pretty good for having them develop "working with an AI assistant" skills. Ultimately, if the result is that AI-assisted programmers can ship products faster without sacrificing sustainability (i.e. you can't have your codebase collapse under the weight of AI-generated code that nobody understands), then I think there will be space in the future for both AI-power users who can go fast as well as conventional engineers who can go deep.
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