About 5 years ago, when I was doing independent development, I estimated my output capacity to be “equivalent to a team of 4 to 5 people composed of top 10% members.” At that time, I thought this was probably the “physical limit” for independent developers, and I could only try to work magic within these limited resources.
After leaving my previous company, I started extensively using AI in my development process. After two or three months, when I tried to estimate my current production capacity limit, I found that this number had become meaningless:
In these few months, I haven’t actually spent much time writing code. I spend less time coding, but the code has improved. AI has eliminated several obstacles: checking documentation, writing basic code, and legacy code migration. These were all my pain points before: grunt work. There’s no challenge to speak of, but you have to do it anyway, and during the process, apart from listening to VTubers, there’s no joy, only consumption of energy and time. Now, most of these tasks can be delegated to AI.
With the freed-up time, I spend more time thinking and experiencing.
Building thinking models is what I consider most important now, and more experiences help make these thinking models more complete. These thinking models aren’t just for helping with decision-making but also for helping with cognition. I believe the process from cognition to decision-making is currently the most energy-consuming thing:
When the brain is no longer occupied by meaningless APIs, programming syntax, and best practices, I believe the next generation of software engineering will focus more on fundamental exploration: experiencing the real world and creating new magic.
I love this era.