Ask HN: How do I thrive in an AI dominated future?

I got into software because it was a good way to solve a broad class of problems. Not because I have some obsession with actually writing code. You can fight the tools and risk becoming obsolete, or you can embrace the tools and adapt to continue to solve problems and deliver value. Just like business users cannot adequately convey requirements to off-shore development firms, they won't be able to get the most use out of ML generated code. They don't know the details of what problems they are trying to solve, nor do they know how to implement the coded suggestions in a production ready capacity. There is still a lot of technical work required to use these tools. The "real" value technical folk provide is being able to decipher and translate business speak to implementation. The only people who should be really worried are those who want to hide in their basement and just program against tickets implementing discrete tasks. The technical folk who actually understand business objectives and are effective at communicating with business folk should still have a long lucrative career ahead of them.

So this is the thing I've been thinking about the most in this AI wave ... people like you in your position.

Depending on how fast AI transforms the economy (which I'm in no position to begin to predict), but presuming some degree of speed that is unexpected by at least a good proportion of people, one of the things that will surely be disrupted the most is the idea of career planning for teenagers and high-schoolers.

Because surely, in line with the idea of the "singularity", one of the corollaries of AI disruption will be that the rate and predictability of disruption events increases. At some point, either there's no point on planning out a career, or the only plans that seem to make sense are either vague, snake-oil, or to focus on really basic fundamental things that entail a major shift in lifestyle and even philosophy like farming.

If anything like that pans out, with sufficient speed, I'd predict some hefty social disruption, like groups of people going hard on Ludditism. But also, I'd predict some general polarisation not unlike what appears to have transpired in the west politically, which I think can be attributable to a growing sense of uncertainty and misunderstanding of an increasingly complex and incomprehensible world.

I know I'm not answering your question. That's partly because, though I'm older than you, I've not settled well on a career in my life and am in a not too dissimilar, perhaps worse, scenario from you. But also, as someone who didn't see this year's wave of AI coming, my response is that I don't have an answer, and I think that that is, and that you're asking this question, the actual problem.

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All that being said, AI pessimism can go too far, and the tone of my post above is certainly guilty of this. Recent AI developments are still very problematic and there's plenty of scope in tech jobs that aren't going to be touched by AI.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of this more optimistic position (for tech at least), I would predict that the blindspot many on here (and in tech in general) will be the experience of juniors with AI being involved more and more.

On one hand, I can see leveraging AI tools to be more productive and learn faster to become more common, especially amongst more adaptable younger people.

On the other hand, I can see AIs making the work of juniors harder, because the AI most easily supplants a junior's non-expert error prone work and so might raise the floor of the bare minimal expertise in the industry without providing accessible means of acquiring that expertise for newcomers. It may quickly become the case, for instance, that writing code in a language and having some vague and basic awareness of tools and concepts is no longer sufficient for a junior, but instead, you need to know the things that an AI doesn't but which are hard to learn without experience, like the pitfalls of combining two tools together, or what certain errors are likely to be caused by etc.

What's a prompt engineer? Can you share some reading material?