Contents
- Introduction
- So what do I actually do now?
- The “Product Engineer” thing makes even more sense now
- What this means for the blog
- I’m genuinely excited
Introduction
When I started this blog and website it was to create tutorials and guides and share my learnings whilst working on projects and side projects. However, as I, and probably many other developers or anyone in the tech industry have probably noticed, AI is becoming more and more prevalent in our day to day work. The impact it has had on the industry has been profound, and it is only going to continue to grow and change the way we work rapidly.
I even had a couple of YouTube videos up, which were tutorials on how to do various things with Astro and NextJS… but I myself haven’t been watching or consuming much coding tutorials and content since tools like ChatGPT and Claude have made finding answers to my questions a lot easier. And I am not complaining, getting the answer to my coding dilemmas in seconds rather than dissecting a video tutorial is a game changer. But even that scenario feels so last year, because since investing more time into using AI terminal-based tools, I am generating more and more code and spending more of my time actually reviewing what I have generated rather than writing it myself… so that kinda killed my enthusiasm for creating “code with me” videos.
I somewhat recently posted on LinkedIn about how I was changing my approach to personal projects and how I felt that “Full Stack Web Developer and Designer” didn’t really capture what I do and how I work. Link to said post
In that post I mentioned I was thinking of myself as a “Product Engineer” and I was going to be focusing more on the product as a whole, the user experience, and the styling and design of whatever project I am distracted with at the time. I mentioned that I’m not going to rebuild everything from scratch or “own” every layer, and that I would be leaning more on third-party services and gluing them together to ship faster. But when I posted that I was not using AI to the same extent I am now with tools like Cursor and Claude, and still very much planning on writing the code myself.
Hilariously enough, with generative AI that post feels almost more relevant now than it did when I posted it.
So what do I actually do now?
That’s the question I keep coming back to. Not in a crisis-of-faith kind of way, more in a genuine “the job description has shifted and I need to update my mental model” kind of way.
When I wrote that LinkedIn post, “Product Engineer” was about stepping back from being precious about the code and focusing on shipping things people actually want to use. The code was still mine, I was just being smarter about where I spent my energy. Now? I’m orchestrating more than I’m typing. I’m describing what I want, reviewing what comes back, tweaking it, steering it, and then moving on to the next thing. The loop is tighter. The feedback is faster. And honestly, I’m building better stuff because of it.
The thing is, the skills that make you good at this aren’t the same skills that made you good at the old version of the job. Writing clean code from scratch is still a valuable skill, but the ability to clearly articulate what you want, to read and evaluate code you didn’t write, and to know when something is good enough versus when it needs to be torn apart, that’s the stuff that matters more now. It’s less about being the person who can write the cleverest function and more about being the person who knows what the right function even is.
The “Product Engineer” thing makes even more sense now
Back when I first started calling myself that, it was a mindset shift. Stop obsessing over the stack, start obsessing over the product. But AI has taken that idea and turned the dial up. If I can go from idea to working prototype in an afternoon instead of a weekend, then the bottleneck isn’t the code anymore. It’s the decisions. What should this thing do? How should it feel to use? What is actually worth building?
That is product thinking. And if you have got a decent eye for design, some understanding of what users actually want, and the technical literacy to steer AI tooling in the right direction and you can move incredibly fast. Faster than I ever could when I was hand-writing every component and agonising over folder structures.
I think this is where a lot of developers are going to end up, whether they use the same label or not. The ones who thrive will be the ones who zoom out from the code and start thinking about the thing they are building as a whole. What problem does it solve? Is it actually good to use? Does anyone care? Those questions were always important, but now there’s less busywork standing between you and having to answer them.
What this means for the blog
This is partly why the blog has been quiet, and partly why I’m writing this post. The old format of “here’s how to set up X with Y” doesn’t feel like the best use of this space anymore. Not because those tutorials aren’t useful, but because the way I’d find and use that information has completely changed, and I imagine it has for a lot of you too.
Going forward I think this space is going to be more about the bigger picture stuff. How I’m approaching projects, what I’m learning about building products rather than just writing code, and the occasional deep dive when I hit something genuinely interesting that’s worth sharing properly. Less “how to configure Tailwind” and more “here’s what I shipped this month and what I learned doing it.”
I’m genuinely excited
I know there’s a lot of anxiety in the industry about where all this is heading, and I get it. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet and nobody has a clear map of where it’s going. But speaking for myself, this is the most energised I’ve been about building things in a long time. The gap between having an idea and seeing it work has never been smaller. The tedious parts of the job are getting automated away and the interesting parts such as the creative decisions, the product thinking and the design are what’s left.
If you’re a developer reading this and feeling a bit weird about the fact that your day-to-day looks nothing like it did two years ago, you’re not alone. But I’d encourage you to lean into it rather than resist it. Figure out what you’re uniquely good at beyond writing code, because that’s the bit that’s going to matter more and more.
As for me, I’ll be here, building things and writing about it. Just probably not recording any tutorials about it.