Just Say What You Want

I don't code much anymore, if at all, but I sure do talk a lot. You hear this from more and more engineers, and it's true. The shift has gone from trying to get AI to do what I want, to talking with AI to figure out what the hell it is I'm doing. It's much more conversational.

I remember when I first started, I was like, make a button, make it bigger, move it over here, no, there, no, you're doing it wrong. I thought AI was stupid, and I just didn't get AI.

Everything changed when I replaced my keyboard with a microphone. The light went on. I'm looking at code, talking about the code, making decisions, correcting the AI when it makes plans. As far as code is concerned, I'm just a spectator.

It's not about the code. It's about the conversation.

Back in the day — which was like a year and a half ago — I used to pride myself on knowing the ins and outs. Prop drilling. Custom hooks. The difference between SSR and CSR. How to make shadcn components look bespoke instead of off-the-shelf. All that became a liability. I was too busy telling AI what to do instead of working with AI on what I wanted.

There's this Seinfeld episode where Kramer's phone number is too close to Moviefone, so he just starts being the movie phone guy. He's reading the newspaper trying to help callers, doing the whole "Press one for Firestorm, press two..." thing. People get confused. Eventually he just says, "Why don't you just tell me what movie you want to see?"

That's where we are right now. We're all learning to just talk to AI. Learning to use our words. Everything changed, and we're still figuring it out.