Feel Good
One of the (understandably) hot topics at work is the sudden rise of agentic AI and debating its merit, use, productivity amplification, etc. I'll admit - I was a total skeptic at first, and I still have... complicated thoughts about its use, but I've come around to it being a tool in the work environment if it's used the right way. Way back when, I used machine learning for my PhD, and while that's the foundation of AI, the application I used it for (bioinformatics and predicting protein interactions) was vastly different to how its being used today, and while I clearly see the value (particularly in the science research realm), it's been hard to wrap my head around how its rise is causing such a rework in how creative and operational workflows previously were.
I'm a (self-taught) software developer by training (I now manage and code far, far less); I've always considered myself a product-minded engineer,and while that's been advantageous in the tech companies I've worked for. I now feel that that skill - being able to understand both the 'why', 'what' and the 'how' of building things - is going to become the baseline for developers of the future. Instead of a waterfall (or agile, it doesn't really matter) approach where a product manager (or stakeholder) defines the why and what and then hands off well-defined (ideally) specs to the tech team, developers are now going to need to be involved higher up in the process to truly be valuable and effective. Coding is rapidly shifting away from typing and crafting methods with the perfect syntax and moving more toward architecting requirements and describing, in detail, implementation in plain English and then handing that off to a machine to do the grunt work.
It's almost become like having small micro-teams made up of a senior engineer 2-3 junior devs, in all ways - the senior designs and architects, and the juniors implement, but the senior also still has the burden of checking the juniors' work and making sure it hasn't gone off-track. The bottlenecks have shifted from actual typing to the bookends of planning and review, and while those have always, theoretically, been a part of the process, there's even more need for them to be crisp and accurate in this new world. In an ideal AI developer workflow, those steps might also be able to be more machine than human (it's amazing how many tests Claude or Cursor can write in a small amount of time, and internal QA feedback loops are definitely a thing), and while I don't think agents will fully replace a human at least somewhere in the process, there's no the role of developer is changing.
I do worry slightly about the future, particularly with actual junior engineers. Me and my team have the benefit of years of experience of incidents and bugs and tech debt and well-done technical builds, and that accumulation of things learned is critical for making sure the 'right' thing is being built. I also worry that we're rapidly approaching a world where AI writes plans and AI codes them and AI reviews them and AI debugs them when things go wrong, and even with a human checkpoint somewhere in that loop, they're so disconnected from what was actually written to really have internalized what was built. There is some benefit to actually typing out code to etch it permanently in some deep recess of your brain that wiped away when it's so easy to just feed an agent something and babysit it by itting enter repeatedly without true internalization.
Anyway, time will obviously tell.
Do Good
This week did drag - I can't believe the farm was the week prior as it felt like a slightly different life.
Saturday was super busy with the gym -> soccer -> swim (and then we all crash and burned in the afternoon), and it was 90 and hot and sunny, which added to it being draining. Charlie did great at soccer this round - it was super fun watching him stop and turn the ball and actually dribble during the games portion of practice, and it's kind of amazing how much he's progressed in just the past few weeks.
Hopefully Hailey will be back to playing next week - she's graduated from the boot to Crocs, and her wound is looking SO much better. We trekked into Raleigh on Thursday to get it checked, and the podiatrist was impressed with how quickly it was crusting over, especially given how nasty it was over the weekend. She's still unbothered.
The major highlight though was heading to White Hill Farms to go strawberry picking on Sunday afternoon. Luckily it was more mild (if not a bit chilly), so it was just a really pleasant few hours running through the lines of berries to find the juiciest bright red ones.
We now have about eight quarts worth... I need to figure out if I can freeze some for smoothies later, because even though my kids devour strawberries faster than they do M&Ms, that's still quite a lot.
Look Good
It was a bit warmer this week, so I was in summer-mode. I need to figure out a better system though for my mid-morning dog walk when it's hot early so I'm not changing repeatedly during the day.