AI Tools Are Powerful, but Your Mental Model Is Outdated

If this guy feels behind, we are cooked. So, Andre Kaparthi, he's the he was the head of AI at Tesla and he's one of the early founders of open AI and he just tweeted that he feels extremely behind when it comes to development in the age of AI. I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. this the profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between I have a sense that I could be 10x more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last year roughly and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue there's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master in addition to the usual layers below now this is very interesting involving agents sub aents their prompts context, memories, modes, emissions, tools, plugins, seals, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, body interation, and I need to build an all incoming meal for strength of fundamentic, fallible, unintelligible, and changing entities. Suddenly, this is a too long sentence by the way, Andre intermingled with what used to be good old-fashioned engineering. So what he's saying here just in this little bit is that there's all of these things and a lot of these things are introduced and are used by claude code hooks, skills, tools, plugins, whatever. So he he's certainly alluding to Claude code being the thing uh you know the de facto tool for all this. But there's so much that you need to learn, not only from like a a technical perspective of just understanding what all of these tools do, what all these things do, but also the mental model around how to use them. Because it's all well and good knowing uh how to use a hammer, you know what a hammer does, how to hold it, you know, how to aim it. You've got to rethink. You've got to re understand. You got to throw everything you've understood out the window cuz it's not relevant in this new age of, you know, prompt engineering or AI assisted engineering. Clearly, some powerful alien tool was handed around uh except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it. There you go. While the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind. And I'll pat myself on the back here. This is something I've been really immersing myself in. Like we're dealing with so much right now. The tools, the mental model around it, the industry, the um not just the industry, but the the planet in general, the economy, everything is just moving at the moment. And we've there's a mad bum rush to figure out figure it all out and be the person or be the um leaders to figure it all out. But no one knows. No one no one's figured it all out at the moment. But his message to everyone is like get stuck in because something big is already happening over the last year. So quite quite a profound and um interesting tweet that came out just after Christmas and a lot of people were talking about it. This is very interesting um especially like that ending while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. So especially after what we just talked about with with Tower. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So the good thing is or like the good news not the good thing it's the good news is you are not alone in this. We are not alone in this. Nobody has figured it out. If he hasn't figured it out if Andrew Kaparthi doesn't know how to you know move forward with all of that that's kind of like okay reassuring because I feel I feel very similar like I see you use clawed code. I see I could my you know uh friend and developer he uses like 10 agents well more than 10 agents at the time and I'm sitting here with cursor I feel like I'm so behind and then I show what I made to my students or like to other people who do web flow and they're like wait you're already there using that they feel behind I feel behind I could is like these agents I cannot do what I want them to do. So he feels like it's not going where it's going and Andrew as well. So this is very interesting but also potentially something to be figured out. And also I want to mention what the the primogen has been talking about the fact that all of this is constantly changing. So we can't go in with the mental model thinking that okay I'm going to learn agents and these toolings around AI and these essentially workflows. These are all workflows, right? That I'm going in, I'm learning these workflows and I will be the god here. I will create whatever the the problem is it's changing like the next month there is something new and the the change changes are rapid and big. It's not like a small change. like the whole new paradigm shifts every 3 months or so is introduced to the uh industry like as a programmer it feels like yeah crazy. It feels like you don't know where to go and it's yeah it's not clear and because of the horrendous capitalist society that we live in. You've also got grifters and chances trying to sell you on their system. There's the system that works. they've done the research and it's you we spoke about fatigue before the before the show like you know it's it's it's real the the feeling of of being left out and some people are capitalizing on and this is potentially a different topic altogether but it's just it's something I've been tuned into recently of just like oh my god like what there's so many people making you feel left out to buy their product or to comment give me please in the comments section below to like get their system that they've you and no one knows. No one knows and I think you it just comes down to you getting stuck in and and trying to trying to be optimistic and and curious about it and trying to get ahead, you know, but it will settle, you know, we will still figure it I think one of the biggest problems with AI and I had a call earlier with someone because you can approach it you can approach it at such a low level or a very very high level you can ask AI to implement your whole feature or you can get it to change a line of code and that what that means is people's and and that's just in code right let alone video production let alone script writing or any kind of other creative thing it means that everyone else everyone's got their own interpretations of whether it's good, whether it's bad or how you should use it, how you shouldn't use it. Like no one no one can tell you how you should shouldn't use it. It's just by its very nature so fallible, so in indeterministic, so whatever. So again, just that encouragement of of just try and stay curious, you know. Plus, not everyone's here to change the world, you know. Maybe you can sit back and chill and then when all the big wigs like and Andre McCarthy has figured out how we should use all some sort of stuff then scrub up on it you know don't well it's hard to sit and not do anything because of course of course we we we are still like working right with with the old tools and trying to use these new tools like I build a website recently and I I I thought I would do it all in cursor but then I had to go back in Web Flow because of like more reliable things around, you know, having a platform that I'm familiar with. Uh while I could just potentially do everything with AI and then ask it to host it, you know, host it somewhere and all of that. It's just a lot to figure out. A lot to figure out, right? And and then also there is the joy about it like the things that Andrew mentioned there are uh a lot of it is is around toolings around AI and not building the thing itself and that is also a little bit about like you know having fun with it or like you know the lack of uh fun existing in it. I I did enjoy going in Webflow in the past few days to to build a few layouts even though I could absolutely ask AI to in cursor to do it but I knew it wouldn't like oneshot it and I would have to go into like the mode of fixing it and prompting to fix bugs and I I I just don't enjoy that as much. Yeah. And we all like familiarity, right? And it's nice to go back into that. And just I don't want to dwell on this too much, but just that idea of knowing what to build. Now, my gut instinct was to respond to that and say, "We already know what we want to build. We want to build websites. We want to build apps." But then something in the back of my head said, and it goes back to this magnitude 9 earthquake that he mentions in that I think we're and what I mentioned earlier as well about the economic climate that we're in is being shaken up. I've said it before, I've said SAS is dead and we're out we're all out here trying to build tools that we can sell to people um because that's all we know. That's the only way we know how to make money, right? With this whole idea that people can just build their own tools, we we probably don't know what we should be building. We're probably going to be building very different things in the next few years than what we have been building. We've been building products. We've been building tools. Maybe we don't maybe we're not going to be coding that. I don't Nobody knows. And I think this just all goes back to this this tweet here um that's specifically talking about development. Um, we're in a very interesting time uh at the moment and it's all so much stuff is all happening at once that it's just yeah, it's hard to it's hard to not feel tired and it's hard to um feel uh steady like we should all be feeling well we are all feeling the the craziness that is AI but I honestly think we we don't know what we should be building because the future We're figuring it out. We're figuring it out. We're figing. We'll be right. We'll be all right. Everything's fine. Set everyone like before, you know, catastrophe hitting. We'll be all right. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.