In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is so wide and changes so quickly that nobody really knows anything for sure. And we are not in ordinary times. The advent of LLMs and AI agents is the largest change to software engineering in my professional lifetime, and possibly the largest change ever. That said, here’s my advice:
- Don’t trust senior engineers who are telling you to pick political fights
- Don’t play games. Keep your head down and be helpful
- Be conscientious and try hard to actually understand what you’re working on
- Don’t panic about AI, and don’t delegate your judgement to it
- Don’t avoid AI — keep thinking!
- Don’t lose hope
If you don’t like it it’s AI slop.
That’s exactly with my issue with people saying something is “AI slop”, it’s a lazy way to shutdown conversation on something you disagree with.
We seem to have forgotten that humans create a lot of low-quality and low-effort content…
Over at sh.itjust.works we recently had a contest to replace our previously AI generated logo (because “AI is bad now”). The human-created replacements were a parade of low-effort copy/paste garbage that were embarrassing to judge… But they were human garbage so we picked one.