Comment by javadhu
1 day ago
I agree on the curiosity part, I have a non CS background but I have learned to program just out of curiosity. This led me to build production applications which companies actually use and this is before the AI era.
Now, with AI I feel like I have an assistant engineer with me who can help me build exciting things.
I'm currently teaching a group of very curious non-technical content creators at one of the firms I consult at. I set up Codex for them, created the repo to have lots of hand-holding built in - and they took off. It's been 4 weeks and we already have 3 internal tools deployed, one of which eliminated the busy work of another team so much that they now have twice the capacity. These are all things 'real' engineers and product managers could have done, but just empowering people to solve their own problems is way faster. Today, several of them came to me and asked me to explain what APIs are (They want to use the google workspace APIs for something)
I wrote out a list of topics/key words to ask AI about and teach themselves. I've already set up the integration in an example app I will give them, and I literally have no idea what they are going to build next, but I'm .. thrilled. Today was the first moment I realized, maybe these are the junior engineers of the future. The fact that they have nontechnical backgrounds is a huge bonus - one has a PhD in Biology, one a masters in writing - they bring so much to the process that a typical engineering team lacks. Thinking of writing up this case study/experience because it's been a highlight of my career.