The Closet Automation Phase

created on 2024-10-11T23:53+0100

I sometimes think about what it will be like to look back at our current times from the future, and today I had a strong sense that the situation we're in at my workplace will one day get a name from AI historians.

Early this year, most of my colleagues were already using some sort of AI chatbot to generate implementation plans, product specifications, reports, and similar things, but they weren't exactly open about it. I wouldn't say secretive, but nobody would say in a meeting, “Look, I used these prompts to generate this report.” Although it was kinda obvious to me from all the em dashes they suddenly started using.

I was guilty of the same thing, I kinda forgot to mention that the new onboarding docs I wrote were almost entirely AI-generated. I even edited them to make them read less like ChatGPT. I thought my colleagues might think less of me if I told them that most of the architectural plans and documentation I had written in the previous few months were written with AI.

Then I started learning that this was happening at other places as well, friends told me about their similar experiences, and I saw the same pattern at my wife's workplace too.

Thinking about all this from the perspective of future AI historians made the whole thing seem ridiculous. I don't yet have a plan of how I'm going to do this differently, but I just started dumping my interview question generator prompts into Confluence.