We've heard from GenX-ers and Millennials talking about their views on AI-assisted software development. We've heard separately from GenZ-ers. But we haven't had all three perspectives in the same room together...until now. What advice do GenX-ers and Millennials have for GenZ-ers in the age of AI-assisted coding, and vice-versa? Find out, as we bring back some of our former panelists, Tim Banks (GenX), and Cassidy Williams (Millennial), and Divyasha Pahuja (GenZ) to talk about how all 3 generations can help each other in our new AI reality.
Key Takeaways
- Everyone wants to join the AI bandwagon because of FOMO...but should they?
- AI skeptics are being treated as Luddites, which is an unfair assessment
- AI helps us build things faster, and helps us get through our otherwise unattended personal projects
- Being a developer in the agentic era means being a manager of agents (less building - more monitoring and observing what's being produced by AI agents)
- Domain knowledge is more appreciated as a developer in the AI era
- Having base knowledge (first principles) is helpful when it comes to troubleshooting/problem solving
- Just as we did with Google, asking "the right questions" and being able to phrase them effectively is extremely helpful for using AI for problem solving/learning concepts
- GenZ doesn't want to be robbed of the experience of troubleshooting.
- Learning from failure is the best way to learn, and because of AI, GenZ is given more room to fail fast.
- One of the side-effects of the AI era is that many folks are unable to handle pushbacks because they're used to AI saying that they're smart.
- Advantages of AI: "Everything feels possible", and AI lets you create content tailored to different learning styles (e.g. neurodivergent kids)
- “Brolulu” - AI has validated a lot of delusions
About our guests
Cassidy Williams
Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time.
Find Cassidy on:
Tim Banks (they/them)
Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.
Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division.
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Divyasha Pahuja
Divyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer.
Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes.
Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early.
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Chapters
00:08 Intro
01:11 Guest intros
03:30 The demo curse
06:18 Live demos at really large tech conferences
09:30 Tape backups & zip drives
14:27 What scares you most about AI?
16:59 People don't know how to have arguments anymore
23:26 Dev work has turned into AI babysitter
25:30 Do you mourn the loss of hand coding?
31:20 Use AI to augment
34:17 GenZ doesn't want to lose the problem solving muscle memory
45:03 What do you need from other generations to help you navigate the AI world?
50:29 Flattening organizations to restructure for the AI world
52:29 Delusions validated by AI ("brolulu")
55:52 What excites you about AI?
57:27 Do we have a reason to fear Skynet?
59:58 Wrap-up
Show Notes
