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The hype around the AI revolution was already picking up speed before I began my software engineering career. The first time it came onto my radar was almost 10 years ago, when DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world champion in a game of Go. At first, it felt distant from my daily work as a software engineer - primarily adding APIs for computer vision, natural language processing and some content generation. But in this past year it made another big leap, and this one seems truly revolutionary. What began as a “smarter” autocomplete and test implementer quickly evolved into a good-enough coding assistant, now becoming fully fledged independent agents showing signs of autonomous problem-solving and decision-making. While still expensive and flawed, the rate of improvement is stunning. Even if progress stops now, it’s clear that the effects on our profession are huge. ...

Caught in the loop of passive consumption I recently decided that I should start producing more and consuming less. This thought usually pops its head during long sessions of doom-scrolling or binge-watching, in those brief moments of clarity between the end of one piece of content and the near-immediate start of another. In these moments, a nagging voice creeps into my mind saying: “Why continue passively consuming? Would another episode / video / podcast / post make any difference to anything?”. The new piece of content loads up and quickly drowns it, and the cycle continues. ...