The new software engineer’s reality, being lead-developer to autonomous agents.
Like many, I have been riding the AI rollercoaster. My lows being filled with mourning for the fun of coding. My highs being full of interesting maths, and interesting concepts behind what makes a model. I’ve enjoyed those eureka moments when an agent churns out a huge block of well-written code.
There are some big questions to wrestle with. Questions which will likely need to be addressed by thousands of teams across the world over the next year or two.
I’m a serial project starter, a twisted project starter? … maybe. Ever since I was young I have loved the process of putting my hands to work and creating something. It’s brought me countless hours of joy and satisfaction, but honestly, it has also poured it’s fair share of grief over my head.
What should I do when energy + sweat > output + satisfaction ?
Much of this grief for me originates from reaching a point where I question whether there is any purpose or meaning in the venture I am undertaking. It’s truly very hard to read the signals sometimes.
With the decision to push the boundaries of what was possible with a local first predictive scheduling, I realised that it will be necessary to abstract the various background tasks for keeping the AI Prediction in the Browser using Vector Embeddings up to date.
The first consideration is that these embeddings would need to be ready when the user started to plan their schedule. They don’t take a lot of time to build at the moment but I expect this to slow as the model gets more expansive.
There is a big movement going on in the Local First circles to give users greater control over their data, greater performance and resilience. They want to do this by building applications that need less access to external servers and even the network at times.
One of the major breakthroughs in recent years which is making this goal more accessible to a lot of applications is the ability to use the power of well established databases within the Browser. Wayback, we saw WebSQL appear in browsers but never gained traction because of licensing and compatibility across all browsers. This was a real shame.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer