With the advent of AI, I've been wondering where to spend my efforts. If you look through social media or even the internet, there are plenty of people who will tell you there's no point in learning to code anymore. I've even used these tools myself and have come quite far with them, even though the code they produce isn't something I'd use for production without first reviewing it myself. At first glance, it does seem like they can help you go faster, until you realize that the code they produce is usually extremely verbose and sometimes follows a lot of patterns that junior engineers would reach for.

I've used some of these tools extensively within LumifyHub, but I truly believe I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have without my own experience in software engineering.

These tools made me realize that I'm spending less time coding and more time prompting, which sometimes feels like you're making progress and going a lot faster, but it came to a point where I even asked the tool to do simple tasks like updating file names or making one-line changes, which honestly would have taken me half a second. There's nothing terribly wrong with doing that here and there, but when you completely depend on these tools to make changes for you, then where do your skills go? Where do all those years of debugging and learning to code go?

I've invested significant effort and time in learning how to design software properly, and here I am just giving those skills freely away to a tool that could go down — and then what?

That's not why I came into this field. I came into this field because I always wanted to be a software engineer, and I always found software fascinating and had a great passion for learning. In software engineering, the learning is endless. The AI tools are still fascinating to me, but I've come to a point where I realize that I can always be productive with the tools, but I also want to be productive without the tools. I'm starting to invest in myself again by making sure I do a couple of things throughout the week now:

1.) If there's a change I want to make, I'm going to manually do it and then compare my work with what the AI would have done

2.) For projects in which I care about code quality, I'm going to review each line the AI generates and think of ways to make it better instead of asking it to do it

3.) I'm going to start learning newer programming languages, like Rust and Zig, because even if these tools can fully do coding (which they really can't right now), I still want to be able to become a better software engineer.

For me, it's always about becoming better. I love this field and how it's opened up so many doors in my life, and I'm going to make sure I keep investing in my own coding skills, even if there are people who have completely given up on it. Besides, what are you going to do when there are outages and you can't actually ask the AI any questions to do your work?

I want to not only maintain my current skills — I want to make them better in the next few years. I've been really great at web development, but I haven't dived much into lower-level programming languages like Rust, and that's something I'm really excited about. Maybe I'll even build my own operating system — who knows? I'll also be posting about that progress as I learn and build these new skills.

To people out there who are wondering whether you should still learn software engineering: yes. Do it. Stop listening to what people are saying on Reddit or Twitter, and just go and learn the thing and get better at it. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.