Software Engineering: The Art of Thinking Out Loud (with AI)
A colleague said something to me recently that I keep coming back to: “Often, by the time you’ve finished articulating a complex problem for the AI, you’ve already solved it yourself.” It sounds almost like a joke. You open a chat window, start typing out your problem in careful detail — and somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph, the answer appears. Not from the AI. From you. If you’ve worked with LLMs seriously, you’ve probably experienced this. And I think it points to something important about what is actually changing in our craft — something that goes beyond the usual conversation about automation and job displacement. ...