Comment by mark_l_watson

I retired several years ago and now I spend my allotted ‘tech time’ learning. Thirty five years ago I used to make up for having the ‘wrong’ degree (Physics instead of Computer Science) by writing books (Springer-Verlag, McGraw-Hill, etc.) and these books helped me get work and do business.

Now I write to learn new things myself and my mode of operation has changed radically: I still manually research and write code but I also ‘flesh out’ my writing and coding experiments using agentic tools. My approach is different because I don’t care at all about work efficiency so I spend a lot of time reading and studying material I generate with AI, and iterating in ways that wouldn’t make sense in a business environment. I still write open content books on whatever currently interests me but I am thinking, after 35 years of being an author, of winding down this activity because I think my readers might be better off doing their own research and coding, and with agentic design, research, and coding tools this gets easier.

BTW, I miss the old way of doing things, and some of what I do now is attempting to make AI less noticeable to me as I work, and using AI to work on my own work environment.

Everyone has different interests and abilities, and if what we might call the current AI hype cycle has any lasting value (open question) it is in letting us as humans ‘go our own way’ and customize tech and our life style to match what we want.