I can’t be the only person who thinks, when they read Boris Cherny describing that he merged 30 PR’s in a day, or Steve Yegge talking about orchestrating dozens of agents with Gas Town, or even to a lesser extent Mitchell Hashimoto saying that your agents should be busy 24/7 that there’s this gap between the picture thought leaders are painting, and the experience us normies have sitting down to work with AI.

Anil Dash expressed this in a way in a recent interview:

“I’m sure there are some people that are like, ‘no, no, this is unlike anything else before. And you have to treat it as a magical special thing.’ But overwhelmingly, 99.9% of coders I talk to, of product people I talk to, designers I talk to are all like, ‘can we just be normal about this?’

There’s a lot of noise that has AI Assisted coding mostly defined by it’s name via the supreme courts process. So this series will be an attempt to synthesize that.

This series is also advice for humans. You’re not falling behind just because you’re not tokenmaxxing. Your concerns about keeping your skills up to date are warranted. Your skepticism is valuable but needs to be challenged. You’ll have to recover from your eventual failure. This intends to be a sustainable perspective on AI Assisted Development. We can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. It changed the game in ways every previous revolution did, by making new things possible, not by making everything before irrelevant.

I don’t claim this guide will be superior to that of my more knowledgeable colleagues - it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate. But it scores over the other more pedestrian works in two important respects. First, it’s slightly more approachable; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters across the cover.

Stay calm, stay confident, act with intention. When the robot overlords subjugate us, you can damn my name. If AI automates us all out of work then fuck it, but assuming it doesn’t, and you’re here for the next phase of software engineering, I think roughly speaking this is the only way to do it. This is the floor, anxiety comes from comparing your floor to someone elses ceiling.

  1. Don’t Panic. Anxiety isn’t going to help you learn.
  2. Stay Engaged - Study every day, I don’t pretend you can be great at this job within the confines of a 9-5, but you don’t have to be extreme either.
  3. Intentional Practice - If you just vibe code every day you probably will get dumb. I don’t think there’s one way to do this right, but I do know that you have to stay in the driver’s seat.
  4. Then finally, I’ll close with the same rule I give my three year old every time we go to a place that has rules. Have fun!