Reflection of Tech While Being Away

Lately, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to take a few weeks off from work. This has given me some time to work on some personal projects, but more importantly enjoy my day to day - without having to watch all the “AI News”. To be fair I’ve been watching things at work to keep up but the distance has allowed me to breathe and reflect on the current environment of software development.

One of the first things I noticed is that all the current day-to-day hype train isn’t as big as it seems when you’re surrounded by it all the time. Everything I’m seeing now is how to improve or make more efficient workflows with the models. It’s not like a new model is dropping each month that is changing everything but when you’re in the fire it seems like it is. In fact, it seems that with a little distance that people and companies are starting to look at these tools like Claude and Chat-GPT for what they are - tools.

Another interesting point I’ve noticed is since I haven’t been working these couple of weeks I’m not talking with my close co-workers, and none of my friends are “techies”. Not a single person has asked me about AI and it showed me how people not in the loop don’t care at all. The only thing that comes up is the data center issues, which is a valid concern, because it’s the only thing that directly and truly impacts their lives. Sure, you can make the argument that the advances we’re making with AI will make changes to the technology to everyone’s life, similar to the Internet, but the jury is still out on that.

“With a little distance, people and companies are starting to look at these tools for what they are — tools.”

Personal Usage #

Just because I’ve had some time off doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing code and using these tools. I have a few personal projects, including this blog that I’ve worked on. I’ve been able to use Claude in ways that I want to try and I’ve found more and more use cases for it that doesn’t fit into my daily tasks at work. I’m also going to look into newer workflows that seem to be gaining more steam like spec-driven development. One of my last POC systems right before my leave followed this workflow and it seemed to get a lot of things right compared to just prompting over and over. But I wanted to take it a step further with a test project that I can control more of the goals and process. Doing some research is hard because most posts are trying to have you use their system and skipping over details if you’re trying to do it yourself but I found a nice article on GitHub to follow https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-with-ai-get-started-with-a-new-open-source-toolkit/. They do plug their tools as well but at least it’s a GitHub repo so you can dig into what it’s doing.