Perspective, not noise.

Being busy and making progress are not the same thing. I was thinking about this again these last weeks because I have been travelling a lot. You ask someone how things are going and very often the answer starts with: Busy. Very busy. And somehow we often say it with a little bit of pride. I do it myself sometimes. A full agenda, flights, meetings, calls, projects. It gives you the feeling that things are moving. That you are needed. That you must be doing something important.

The people around me who understand AI the best are often the most critical of what it produces. And I don't mean they believe less in AI. Quite the opposite. Many of them use it heavily. I notice the same thing in my own work. Recently I had AI working on a task for me for hours. It kept trying different routes, making things more complicated and somehow getting further away from a simple solution. At some point I stopped it.

"Is coding dead?" A Computer Science graduation student I coach asked me this today. I am also the stakeholder for her graduation project, so we regularly talk about what she is building, how she approaches it, and what becoming a software engineer might look like in the coming years. Behind her question was obviously another one: Am I preparing myself for a profession that may disappear? I gave her the most honest answer I could. I think coding as pure execution is slowly dying.

The faster AI writes code, the more architecture matters. The strange thing about AI coding is that I am writing less code, but thinking more about software. I notice this more and more in my own work. Agents can build surprisingly fast now. I can give them a direction, let them work, review what comes back and keep moving. Things that used to take hours of coding can sometimes be done while I am busy with something completely different.

Some software only needs two users to be worth building. Last week I built a school app for my daughters. Half a day, working from my phone, partly while waiting for my car to be repaired. One of their phones could not run the school's app. The interface was awkward for them. I wanted their lessons, breaks and free periods to make sense at a glance. Two users, with a problem I could see up close.