AI and the Curious
A take on AI as a GenZ dev who has seen equal amounts of before and after AI landscape
Prologue
I remember when I first started programming very well. I was around 14 years old. Started tinkering with arduino boards and writing tiny programs that didn’t do much. I remember what got me into it. It was hardware. I remember moving cities due to Dad’s work, it was a new place, start to a new life and I was around 12 years old. It was a gloomy evening with rainy season just around the corner. I had been bored at home and had exhausted all of my toys. I was a homebody and trying to figure out what to do to kill time.
I came across one of my broken toys, and a white and blue box caught my eye. I knew it was called a battery but I didn’t know what else it did. So I broke the rest of the toy until what I had infront of me was the underlying machinery. It was an RC Truck. So the machinery infront of me that I could make of was -- this blue box is connected to 4 shaft like things (motors)
After placing random wires on random pieces for hours I finally figured out what a battery does. After shuffling things in a mess, I join two ends of the wires to each side of the battery and the other ends to one of the motors. It immediately whirs and spins and sends a tiny vibration across my fingers. I remember how it felt that day. I was hooked on whatever it was.
I remember the next couple of years breaking random toys, my Dad’s headphones and other electronics in the household. I used to get scolded so much for this. Happiest times of my life. But I remember that was what sparked the joy of creation within me.
Programming Before AI - Eden of coding
I have been programming consistently and shipping software for companies for a good 7 years. Starting in early 2019. It used to be extremely tedious work to get software working on your local machine. Stack overflow was everyone’s best friend. What came along with this was bug-specific indefinite amount of tabs open in your browser, followed with a fleeting yet comforting feeling of closing those once your fix had been deployed to production.
Everything was manual. It was hard to setup basic projects and I used to feel sorry for our web dev brothers. The javascript ecosystem since then has been equally as chaotic as it is today. The laborious nature of writing, building and maintaining software filtered out many people early to opt out of software engineering, leaving only those with pure passion for the game.
Why call it an Eden then?
It was peaceful. It was not unlike Gardening. Each day you tended to your software with care and love, each day you made a little progress. Your incremental growth in software was in tandem with reality itself, with the pace of life. How river carves it’s way across terrains little by little each day until it meets the ocean. There was intentional information online. You found exactly what you were looking for, software was collaborative and nurturing and we cared about building and sharing what we had built.
It was about sharing the same childlike wonder we had for the same thing.
Grass is Greener on the other side
Today software is accessible to the non-technical. The vibers. Money chasers. It’s like giving the cure of cancer to everyone so now everyone wants to sell their half-baked knowledge to the world and make money. Only doctors should be able to cure cancer even if the answer is known to everyone.
Only engineering acumen should be allowed to build software that is supposed to be used by alot of the people around the world. Online, you cannot know the difference between a proper engineer and someone who is an expert parrot.
Expert parrots are extremely skilled at sounding technical and they are almost indistinguishable from real engineers. In real life they are easy to spot by the way they talk and articulate thoughts. What this leads to is cult-following shilling. Alot of people simply want the engagement bait and the most controversial opinions are always shared online to create a divide amongst 2 schools of thoughts.
It drives likes, shares and ultimately what every human craves - dopamine.
What this has created for real engineers, seeking healthy, technically heavy debate craving for something real. A relic of the past.
How is grass greener on the other side? Everything seems negative this way..
AI and Curiosity:
While the tech world online continues to divide itself in 2 extremeties, life as we often figure out works out of the Gray zone. Something our survival-coded, hunter-gatherer brains always seem to overlook amidst the tunnel vision created by the constant flux of information. Here is something for all types of engineers - junior, senior, architects or veterans.
The common denominator is still in play - Human Curiosity.
What AI has provided us amongst other things, is also the ability to self-educate. To direct our own learning. To reach the depths of understanding our curiosity always wanted to lead us to, but was only limited by the place of our birth, university, level of education, economic stability of our country and kind of books available to us. But now, we are at a point where we can go out of our syllabus and explore the world the way we want to.
This was always a dream of mine since childhood. I dreamt of stanford but couldn’t imagine competing for scholarships, had no finance to support paying such hefty prices let alone cost of living, the places I studied throughout my academic years were less than subpar (my teachers used to youtube before teaching us in undergrad). I always failed at studying because what I know now, which I failed to understand as a kid, and every teacher in my life failed to as well that understanding is highly subjective but eventually everyone has the capacity to understand topics they care about. It’s just that what differs is the starting point.
I was always a slow learner, always used to wonder why I couldn’t just understand matrices or differential calculus. What anyone around me failed to tell me was that I lacked the first principles to develop the intuition to even begin understanding these. Yet they were part of the syllabus and the advice our teachers used to give us was “memorize”.
In my local language we called it “ratta” which means mirror everything in your brain word-to-word without a shred of understanding.
With AI, and self-directed learning, I have embarked on the journey the kid me always wanted to. Wanting to learn any topic my heart desired, the way I want to, with my own pace and with guidance. I remember asking doubts to questions in my tuitions used to cost me a good 3 minute scold from teachers to not disturb the rest of the class. Now with life experience developing my frontal lobe and having enough self-awareness, I know exactly what I don’t know, the gaps in my understanding to connect the dots so that I can truly understand a specific concept. I can simply direct the AI with proper context so it can help me learn.
Learning has become a skill for me in itself.
I have picked up topics such as geometry which I was able to learn by telling AI to build me interactive visualizers for different formulas.
I learned basics about radio-frequency as a foundation for bluetooth and BLE by telling AI to use whiteboarding software to draw how frequency works, the structure packets, etc.
I always wanted to understand storage systems so I started by asking it the basics of file, what it means to write to a file, understanding bits and bytes and what is variable integer encoding.
You would think being a professional engineer means they know how a database actually works.
No.
Most don’t know what is endian-ness.
And that’s where the gray zone is. We are feared that AI will take what we already dont have. AI will never be able to take your ability to understand and humanity will always be 1 step ahead because our understanding is the superset.
Why you might ask?
The only reason - Human Curiosity
Conclude
I conclude my take on AI with this -> I like AI as much as the next person. I dislike AI as well at times. No technology is perfect. But in all the years of programming, if I as an engineer have felt wielding the knowledge of coding was like wielding a sword, with AI and my tenacity, today I wield a warship.