I felt a similar way when I visited the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4m telescope in La
Palma in the Canary Islands. It’s hard to take pictures of the entire telescope because it’s so damn big. I love experiencing the feeling of being in awe.
You don’t need to learn how to code if you’re not working on anything important & interesting. But you’ll be limited to what AI can do for you. If you need to solve problems where AI is weak, you’ll need the skills to do the work yourself.
A less obvious problem with not learning to code is that you’ll be less competitive because you don’t really have any specialized skills. Everyone can fire up Claude Code and knock out something. But if Claude Code gets stuck, or simply can’t solve your problem, then what will you do?
This is my own personal experience as a senior engineer.
I hired my first ever intern for myself this past week for a personal. Rather than expecting someone who is experienced to knock out tasks or whatever & try to justify the expense, Intern and I just check in once a day about whatever feels like most important, and each do our thing. We chat as needed. I told Intern we’ll work on whatever, just making sure that they will have something tangible and targeted to show at the end of the summer. No ticket tracking or Slack or anything. Just texting, video chats, and the occasional email. I pay someone to listen to me rant long enough to get to the point, giving me focus that’s hard to find on my own, intern works on targeted things for a day at a time, and we’re just plodding along. It’s great and I find the process to be extremely refreshing.
When I’m trying to brainstorm with Claude Code or pick-an-AI-tool, I find the process frustrating and draining. The results I get from trying to do everything myself with a robo-junior are mediocre and uninspiring.
I didn’t even interview intern. I just reached out directly on LinkedIn and offered a summer internship. I figured anyone with a half decent profile will be smart enough to follow along and offer ideas of their own. Basically my thought was if I offer ever and expect nothing, I’ll take all the pressure off, and just let them work. Ask me again in a months if this was a good idea or not.
I think working with newbs is fantastic, and I plan to do a lot more of it.
Open source models are not immune to a different form of restriction either. I recently learned that China is restricting travel for AI engineers living in China.
I visited the Philippines in December and January and it was great. The highlight of my trip was learning to scuba dive in Mindoro. Highly recommend a visit.
My experience has been there’s more “what did it make and does it work?” overhead. It’s like a junior developer throwing stuff over the wall and I’m responsible for seeing if it sticks.
I’m guessing the Neo attracts a lot of new Apple customers, many of which will become subscribers of higher margin Apple services & apps in the App Store.
It’s not hard. You give them mentorship and time. Even as a senior engineer, I’ve found it difficult to get assistance at times from team members. Everyone is more focused on knocking at tickets for tomorrow’s standup, and there’s a disincentive to spend time on anything other than doing your own work.
I’m an American living abroad. I know a bit about this. Here’s my experience:
- The USA passed a law called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which mandates that any bank doing business with Americans overseas must report certain information to the USA: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/foreign-account-...
- When anyone anywhere in the world opens a bank account, the bank asks if you have ever been a “US Person,” and if you have been, then you need to provide documentation about whether you currently are or aren’t (typically showing a USA passport or proof of having renounced USA citizenship)
- For banks that will work with Americans, they have to report basic information back to the USA every year, which includes highlights like your contact information, tax ID, account numbers, end-of-year balance, etc.
- Americans also must self-report this kind of information via the FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, technically FinCEN Form 114), which isn’t too horrible to fill out other than the fact that you file it through FinCEN’s clunky BSA E-Filing system, which still wants you to install Adobe Acrobat Reader like it’s 2010.
- FATCA is primarily annoying to banks because they already have to comply with CRS, the Common Reporting Standard, which is basically an international standard developed by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) where participating countries automatically report each other’s residents’ financial information. The kicker is that the USA never actually joined CRS, so banks have to run a whole separate FATCA process just for a relatively small number of Americans living abroad, which is a big duplication of effort.
I learned the hard way that I couldn't just ship a laptop to myself from the USA to Mexico. I had a nice, new-ish Macbook Pro that I wanted to use sitting in the USA, and the laptop I was using in Mexico was getting old. What I should have done was just fly to the USA to get the nice laptop and then hand carry it back. What I did instead was ship the laptop via Fedex to my address in Mexico. Big mistake.
Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.
Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.
You can build things quickly with AI, but you can’t delegate your responsibilities to AI. Once the AI starts struggling, you’ll need to takeover and figure it out.
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mpope