AI is Moving Fast. But Context Moves Slower.
“In the AI age, your value won’t be defined by how many tasks you can do but by the problems you solve”
- TheWhiteBox
I live my daily fight with FOMO and the general stress of not being riding every train and damn unicorn (not to mention frameworks and libraries) about AI.
Every morning, I wake up to a world that has produced at least 50 new cool projects. Overnight.
The feeling is overwhelming, and the future, I have to admit, looks grim from a software engineer's perspective.
🧐 BUT, IS IT?
This very morning, I played my part in a strategy meeting. No coding. No slides. We only debated and drilled into a technology adoption problem involving multiple teams working on various technologies in different countries.
Sure thing, AI will help get the job done. Most of it. But that will be only task execution. That is not the value.
🧪 That’s only the CATALYST for the value proposition.
The REAL VALUE lies:
- in the strategy
- in the communication process
- in the critical decision-making
My value is to use my 20+ years of experience - enhanced by AI - to digest a long stream of technical constraints (well… fuckups) into a simple list of key concepts that a business decision-maker can use to do their job.
Can AI do this alone?
I doubt it.
💡 WHY?
👉 Because THE PROBLEM IS GATHERING THE CONTEXT.
For situations like this one, the context is scattered over multiple years of social and technical interactions, non-documented knowledge (we still propagate most of it verbally, and we don’t even realize the cost of it), different people’s vocabulary, and ways of understanding unfamiliar concepts.
There is too much context that API calls cannot gather here. That’s the problem I solve. I connect dots that lie within different people and slowly emerge after each human interaction.
Part of this interaction happens over Teams or Slack and could be automated, but a consistent portion happens at the coffee machine, over dinners or random conversation.
This last part is challenging for an LLM to access.
🫵 AM I FOREVER SAFE?
Maybe not. If AI ever gains direct access to our thoughts, then my job, yours, — and human interaction itself — could be obsolete.
But wait… let’s go for the red pill!