Comment by reverend_gonzo
17 hours ago
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
17 hours ago
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
That's not what the word "native" implies, but I think that's what he means here.
Exactly, I think there's actually an advantage to using these tools with a few decades hands on experience. At least, I'm getting satisfactory results and I frequently lean on my experience to prevent AI tools derailing. But it's actually a lot of work as well. More or less a full time job at this point.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
...but you're probably expensive and getting rid of expensive people without being involved in an "ageism" lawsuit is a great gift to a CEO.
Same, I've been coding for 40+ years, and other people I know of similar length of time also seem real quick to adopt AI. I'm constantly having to show the young devs how to get the most out of their AI agents and also adapting my workflows regularly as things changes. Weirdly its some of the youngest who are most resistant, I think because they are learning coding skills, and just have got the hang of coding such that they are productive, and AI is coming in and taking that away from them largely, they are still keen to code. While I've enjoyed coding, realistically it's always been the bottleneck in creating software. A lot of the process is about how to effectively manage that bottle neck, now a lot more options are available. Iterating quick, trying different things, experimenting. Much easier to throw something away when you have better ideas.
I've been coding for 25 years now, and it's not that I see AI as evil, but more that it doesn't solve any of my problems or looking back, any problems I had at previous roles.
It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it in their designs ready for their next job role. I spend probably more time in meetings than doing coding.
Why can't I have an AI that takes my meetings for me?
I started with x86 assembler and Turbo Pascal (I still remember when I got documentation for Turbo Vision - this was groundbreaking!).
The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.
Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.
Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.
As a "young" coder I am hesitant because I don't have decades of skills to fall back on.
It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.
Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.
You nailed it. Only option is to build skills, preferably on company time. Just remember there's a lot of mediocre devs, and you probably have more time than you think to do things.
I'm about the age where I need a walking stick and a cyborg arm to keep up with all these leetcode artists. AI couldn't come at a better time.
I've been around the block and I feel the same.
The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).
That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.
Stop it. You are just making ceos like coinbase’s richer and right.
That's not what the word "native" means.
> I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
I think this is just semantic drift (though I am broadly sympathetic to “boo semantic drift”). I see this business use of the term as treating the “mind attuned to being immersed in” and “habitually, automatically reaches for” sub-meanings as the relevant ones, which is (almost as you say, but skew) not quite the same thing as “proficient when the ability is actively engaged”. The more you're trying to navigate a dynamic environment rather than hiring for tasks well-defined in advance, the more that distinction matters in practice.
Except people who are learning to leverage it appropriately already know better than to generate important production code by "managing fleets of agents".
None of these execs are AI-native, and the managers tend not to be either