The AI pause

And the death of recall

For those that don’t know, I am a software engineer.

That means I write code most of the time.

With the rise of LLMs though, something is shifting.

Today I want to talk about the AI pause and try and predict how things will shift in the next 5 years.

First, it was co-pilot, then ChatGpt, and now Cursor.

A whole wave of tools has exploded onto the scene, promising to help us code better, code faster.

I myself have been using Co-pilot since it was in beta and am a paying user of OpenAi, Claude, and Cursor.

While I won’t claim to have harnessed the power of the AI. I noticed something.

Where I used to type furiously, I now tend to slow down.

Whenever I hit if or while conditionals, I wait.

I pause for a little, hoping that the little black box of weights will figure out the perfect line without me having to think or write it.

Whenever I hit a routine code flow, like checking for an error after calling a function, I wait.

I pause hoping that the hidden senior dev has picked up on it and auto-completes it for me.

We are getting to the point that these auto-complete assistants are considered child's play.

We don’t even need to write code now. Tools like Bolt, Replit Agent, and Cursor Composer automatically create the required scaffolding across multiple files.

Simply specify what you want and get the results.

Therein lies the AI pause - a homage to the death of thinking while coding.

Now we simply ask and wait to get what we want.

It used to be that anyone with a dream could learn to code and distribute a product to be successful.

Now, you just need to know how to distribute a product.

Of course, having a bias to action and being patient with results are still fundamental qualities that would be required.

What does this mean for programming specifically?

It means that we have to go deep and niche. Sectors where there just isn’t enough data for LLMs to have been trained well (relatively speaking).

On a whim, I think areas like kernels or compilers will stay relevant, where the difference being 1 bit off is the world between working and not working.

Full stack devs will level up as a whole and we will see more being done by less.

Just like how we had many farmers and factory workers displaced, the same will happen for developers.

This means that more of us can focus on the bottom line and generate more for the companies we belong to.

It also means that now, if you can dream it, you can make it.

Time to make it.