Over the last 12 months I’ve fallen back in love with software engineering.

LLM-assisted coding is everything I’ve always wanted from programming. The craft remains but I can create things at something closer to the rate I can conceive of them, rather than the 10x delta there’s always been between the two.

But when it comes to technology I enjoy shiny new things, I always have. And I like to learn new things by being thrown in the deep end without an instruction manual and left to “figure it out”.

For anyone who — like me — experiences nothing but excitement and optimism when confronted with AI, it’s easy to be bemused by people who react differently.

But for a lot of people, including people who are also excited by the change, it’s not all upside.

Individual jobs, entire companies and even countries are overnight coming to terms with the idea that over the next decade, success will be determined heavily by the level of mastery achieved with AI.

For many people — software engineers included — this means a fundamental shift in the skills needed to earn a living.

This is unsettling.

A dynamic which has unfolded across several corners of the internet is one of hostility. Where those embracing AI shout at those who aren’t yet about how wrong they are, and are then surprised when this doesn’t change their minds!

There aren’t many rules that turn out to be consistently always right (apart perhaps from “nothing good ever came from staying out after midnight”) but “shouting at people and telling them they’re stupid never made them agree with you” is one that has.

Different people adapt to change at different rates. Many of the concerns about AI are valid (if often overstated). It’s broadly beneficial in any group to have a mixture of approaches to change, it acts as a useful smoothing function.

The people who embrace change rapidly make sure we don’t miss out on opportunities, the people who adapt more slowly help us avoid whiplash and discarding valuable parts of what came before.

AI has the potential to make a lot of people’s lives and jobs a lot better.

But we’ll persuade people of that by bringing them on the journey, not by shouting at them and telling them they’re wrong.

And AI is way too much fun to waste time fighting about it.