I Was a 10x Engineer. Now I'm a 100x Engineer.

There's a video going viral right now

about an engineer talking about how they

were a 10x engineer and then their

skills overnight thanks to AI somehow

became totally useless. He's saying that

the craft is dead and thousands of

engineers are watching the video nodding

their heads along and giving into

fatalism. This is part of a bigger

trend. This isn't some visionary iconic

YouTuber with a view of the future. To

some extent, they're riding the wave

that's going on on tech, Twitter, and

Reddit right now, which is AI is taking

all of our jobs. Things are dark and our

career doesn't matter anymore. This

fatalist wave is going to cost thousands

of tech workers their careers, but not

because AI is replacing them, because

they are choosing to believe it is

replacing them. I'm going to show you

why this argument is historically

illiterate. It's actually exclusionary,

which I have no patience for. And the

same tools that supposedly made that

engineer useless have turned me from a

10x engineer into a 100x engineer. This

one hit close to my heart because I have

some personal experience here. I did not

start my career as a software engineer

or even a technologist. I started it as

a composer, if you can believe it. I

went to school. I'm formally trained in

classical western music composition. I

primarily wrote pieces for small chamber

ensembles. So think cello, violin,

piano, that sort of thing. Over the

years, I started to get a little bit

more interested in how a computer could

sort of extend some of the sonic worlds

that I was exploring. And gradually,

gradually, gradually, as I picked up

more tools from the computer, the

computer became my main instrument,

either through the synthesizer or

through programming. So I learned a lot

of these tools as a necessary evil

initially and then came to love them

later. is I came to love the craft, the

ways of putting software together, the

feel of a good system. I began to

appreciate those things over time, but

as a secondary effect of me using the

computer as a tool of self-expression.

So, learning APIs, memorizing syntax,

memorizing le code problems, that was

never the point for me. It just kind of

came with the territory. But I got busy.

I became an engineering leader. I had a

bunch of one-on- ons. I started doing a

YouTube channel. I had my first kid. I

have a second kid on the way and time

got tight. I didn't have a lot of time

to work on side projects and I missed

that. What AI has done has it has

brought that back for me in a minimal

amount of time. I'm able to accomplish

at least 10 times more than I used to be

able to accomplish while sitting down

and programming or creating software,

let's say, at the computer. The computer

remains a tool of self-expression for

me, but it is highly more efficient than

it used to be. And I'll say it even

though I'm not supposed to. Nobody's

supposed to say this right now. It's a

good thing. It's a good thing because

that's what happens with tools as they

get better. The first can opener was

probably not very comfortable on the

hand. It probably was really thin, hard

to hold, and now they have those big fat

handles. They have a little indent for

the thumb on them. All of the tools in

your kitchen, go pick one up and look at

the handle, and I bet it's really nicely

suited to your hand. But it didn't start

out that way. It developed towards the

human. When you get in your car and

drive, you pro hopefully have power

steering. Power steering is not in the

car because it's good for the car or it

helps you drive better. It helps you

drive easier. It's because the human

wanted power steering. It's better for

the human. So tools adapt to the way

that humans are over time, not the other

way around. Everything starts crude and

then becomes more refined to fit the

human better. AI is no different. And so

the loudest people in the AI is making

me useless wave are interestingly enough

people without a lot of depthy or

breathy or even very long experience in

the tech industry. They're making these

claims and tens of thousands of people

are watching these videos and taking

them as fact. Let's take one example.

The guy who made the viral video that I

referenced in my opener, he made an

application called Standard Notes and it

got a respectable amount of users,

300,000 or so. Proton bought the

company. He left the company a year

later. Started working on a new project

called Shape. And even a flag on the

play there. Proton is chasing him down

about a cease and desist. He insists

that he's able to keep working on it.

Proton says absolutely not. So, he's

building another micro SAS tool and he's

making a bunch of videos on how

engineering is dead. And this doesn't

sit right with me. He has no fang

experience, no unicorn startup

experience, no PhD, no defense tech, no

obvious research track record, nothing.

He's created a couple of small SAS

companies

and one that's in legal battles. So far

as I know, he's never managed

engineering organizations. And I'm not

saying this to be cruel or to

just undermine the guy. I think it's

cool that we have all these different

perspectives on YouTube, but it's not

real front and center in the video. And

I want to make sure that you understand

when you are watching content like that,

consider the source and consider that

you may be looking through a very narrow

lens that lacks depth and breadth and

even time experience in the industry.

You might be falling for logical

fallacies or you might just be seeing

things through a very very narrow lens

of what's going on. I want to offer you

a different picture today. A lot of the

argument boils down to memorization was

my moat and that's exclusionary. If your

definition of a good engineer is an

engineer that has successfully memorized

more APIs, more function names, more

patterns, more leak code puzzles than

anyone else, then you have automatically

cast a value judgment on folks with

memory impairment, learning differences,

or are on the spectrum. And I take this

personally as someone on the spectrum

and that learns a little bit differently

than other people. As an example of

that, I had a pretty low GPA in high

school and undergrad. The main reason

for that wasn't because I wasn't sharp

and couldn't think my way through a

problem. It was because I couldn't

memorize stuff. I can't memorize dates.

I I can't memorize facts and figures.

It's always been an issue with me. And

I've come to appreciate it over time as

something that makes me unique. And I

actually, you know, love and accept that

in myself. But once I got to grad school

and the game became my own research and

critical thinking over rope

memorization, I excelled. I got my

masters. I went right on to my PhD and I

completed my PhD in a faster time than

anybody else in my cohort. I was out by

the time I was 29 with a PhD. It's not

an anecdote to say I'm brilliant, but

compare and contrast that with my

experience in high school and undergrad

with a low GPA and like just barely

scraping by to really excelling in grad

school. It's just a different skill set.

the game changed from recall to

reasoning and I could win the reasoning

game. What people like that are really

saying is that my unique cognitive

ability in one domain was my moat and

I'm really unhappy that now the space is

more inclusive and other people that may

have been excluded from that before are

able to participate. That's essentially

what they're saying. And as someone

who's been an engineering leader for a

long time, if you've ever worked for me,

you know that I fight tooth and nail for

meritocracy and representation of