Coding is an incredible skill and asset.
But it’s not the end goal.
Software Engineering is the precise exploration (by humans) of software solutions to human problems.
We are just moving away from disparate machine encoding to a unified (human) encoding.
In this new era the bottleneck is the same as it was before.
Structured communication is and has been the bottleneck for building.
But the impact of it will be 10-100 times more since time to write code is reducing.
talking to people, knowing what to build, gathering requirements, knowing how to build it, knowing why to build it, knowing if it has been built correctly, and ultimately has achieved the intentions that you set out with
That’s what always mattered.
And now that matters orders of magnitude more.
- You talk to users to understand their challenges
- You distill these discussions and ideate concrete goals to alleviate those challenges
- You plan ways to build those goals
- You share those plans with colleagues
- You translate those plans into code
- You test and verify that the result matches your plans and achieves your original goals
Therefore:
The person who communicates best becomes the programmer of future. If you can communicate effectively, you can program.
insights inspired by Sean Grove of OpenAI’s talk at AI Engineer World’s Fair