Another Magic Show

On becoming one with the AI.

Software development is hard. I used to make it a point of pride. I've spent countless hours of my life - nay, days, weeks, months - studying arcane rituals and trying to solve a particularly modern problem: how make computer work good? Well, I know how, and it doesn't suit my purposes to tell you.

Over three decades of exposure and curiosity, two of which in a full-time software development career, I have become a veteran computer user with a near-magical influence over all the devices we use every day. When my wife's computer stops working, I walk into the room, and it's instantly fixed. My power is immense and rather unexplainable.

This mystique - mostly accidental, but it never hurt to curate it - served me well for most of my career. I can understand business problems extremely well, and I know enough magic to formulate sustainable, working solutions. Some of my magic is still in effect many years later; a lot is not, as it turns out magic is not immune to software or corporate churn, but I digress.

Lately, I am finding magic is not enough any more. Every single vacancy I see demands a level of comfort with 'AI-assisted working' in exchange for the privilege of employment. Nobody states their AI productivity rubric upfront, their AI budget, any risk assessment. It's just true now that if you aren't comfortable working with AI, you aren't getting the job.

Many better analysts and writers have already discussed at length and more eloquently the deleterious societal, environmental, ethical etc. impacts of AI as popularly understood (and I am not going to waste energy being precise in my language; you know I'm talking about LLMs, not radiograph analysis.) I have even mildly riffed on it myself. But what I don't hear people talking about very much is taking it personally, which I did. I need food and shelter, and for that, I need you to pay me for my magic show. What AI has done is to sneak onto the stage behind me, hold up a mirror, and show my whole ass to the audience. Anyone still suspending their disbelief is being very charitable.

I know this now because I've spent the last month belatedly experimenting with Claude Code after years of resistance. These are the facts: it's ten times more knowledgeable than me, or more. It writes code at ten times the speed, or more. It's accurate, and it's mindful: it rarely does anything I didn't ask it to, and goes out of its way to ask me questions when it needs information. It writes better documentation than me, and it has so much spare time that it writes all the tests, too. Using a small set of core instructions, it's well-behaved, staging work piece-by-piece for me to review and understand before allowing it to continue. Twenty-point plans are resolved in hours, not weeks. (This is a very conservative compari-guess, because I have already accomplished things I never saw happening in this lifetime or the next.)

Magic is how you end up with ridiculous behemoths like Magento. That is to say, computers can't be fooled; magic is for the primitives, people like you and me. How do Magento's function overrides work? With code generation, of course, but for some reason, all filesystem writes are 777. (That means anyone can access them, including naughty people.) Correctness and reliability may be the true indicators of a software product's value and lifetime, but above a certain scale, it just has to be comprehensible on some level so that someone, somewhere in the world, can wrangle it even a little bit. Some bugs are OK, as long as people exist that have a dream of fixing them.

Back in the mid-10s, I spent weeks studying Magento's innards just to achieve a foundational grasp of how to operate and deploy it effectively, as an implicit beta tester for a partner company that was racing to be the first to launch it. What a waste of time. With no more than an interpretational buffer between myself and the machine, I no longer need to solve for my own limits of comprehension or recall. Claude can synthesise all that into in a few explanatory paragraphs within a minute or two, then move on directly to the business story I'm actually supposed to be working on without missing a beat.

(It would be very easy to accuse me of learning nothing by gliding over explanations instead of engaging with the substance, a common retort in development circles. You'd be wrong. I am paying attention, and I'm learning what is useful. It's just that understanding how Magento generates code to enable function overrides is a particularly unhelpful and extremely boring form of magic.)

I'm learning I'm an excellent coordinator for an automated workforce that is hundreds, even thousands, of times more productive than I ever could have been even equipped with a full team of human staff. I know the AI doesn't really understand the thrust of what we're doing here, any of us, and it doesn't matter, because it's just a computer. It's a wifi-enabled parrot. If it seems opaque, it's still just doing its job, and it falls to me to draw a line where its opacity stops being useful. (After all, if you want to know how all the magic tricks work, it's your duty to become a magician.)

It turns out that being a magician for most of my life is still helpful, because working with an AI, now I am participant and audience. I know all the tells: obfuscation, misdirection, and occasionally straight-up lying. The computer's stupidity is obvious to me, and I can direct its attention in a way that is useful and efficient. It can only dream of ever doing the same to me. I am too messy and complex to be controlled like that. I cover my ass again and turn the mirror back to the AI: how dare you undermine me. What magic are you trying to sell?

It is frustrating to see how easily the AI's tricks have worked, so that it's insinuated itself into practically every home, every institution, every government, with remarkable efficiency - without actually doing anything very different than I have done to date. AI has stolen my magic. But magic is ephemeral, mostly by virtue of not being real, and I can take it back somehow.

In the meantime, please come to my show. I need to eat.