Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:29 · Simon Willison
[00:29:29] S0: So Thoughtworks, the big IT consultancy, did an offsite about a month ago and they got a whole bunch of engineering VPs in from different companies to talk about this stuff. And one of the interesting theories they came up with is they think this stuff is really good for experienced engineers. It amplifies their skills. That's great. It's really good for new engineers because it solves so many of those onboarding problems. If you talk to Cloudflare and Shopify both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 2025 because the intern onboarding costs, it used to be takes a month before your intern can do anything useful. Now they're doing something useful within a week because the AI assistant helps them get up and running faster. The problem is the people in the middle. If you're mid-career, if you haven't made it to super senior engineer yet, but you're not new either, that's the group which ThoughtWorks resolved were probably in the most trouble right now. That's the open question because they don't have that expertise to amplify and use with these tools and it's not as benefit... They've got all of the boosts that the beginners were getting, they've got already, so that's an interesting open question right now for me is it's more the sort of mid-level as opposed to the beginners or the advanced people.
00:30:48 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:48] S1: It's so interesting how AI is coming at the middle of so many things. It's coming at the middle of the product development process. It's coming at the middle of seniority. There's probably other examples. And I'm guessing this is true for all functions, like PMs designers too, just new PMs designers, maybe because being AI native basically is what you're describing and ramping up much more quickly. I guess while we're on this topic, a lot of listeners here are just like those people in the middle. What would your advice be to them to help them avoid becoming a part of the permanent underglass?
00:31:22 · Simon Willison
[00:31:22] S0: That's a big responsibility you're putting on me there. I think the way forward is to lean into this stuff and figure out how do I help this make me better? A lot of people worry about skill atrophy. If the AI is doing it for you, you're not learning anything. I think if you're worried about that, you push back at it. You have to be mindful about how you're applying the technology and think, "Okay, I've been given this thing that can answer any question and often gets it right, doesn't always get it right. How can I use this to amplify my own skills, to learn new things, to take on much more ambitious projects?" Something I've been enjoying, I think the thing I've enjoyed most about this as a software engineer is that my level of ambition has shot right up because now, I never used AppleScript because AppleScript is a whole programming language you have to learn. And I've been using AppleScript for like two and a half years now because ChatGPT knows AppleScript and so now I can automate things on my Mac and that's great. And previously, the fact that it would take me two or three months to learn basic AppleScript was enough for me never to use it. And now I've got all of these technologies that I'm using because that two to three month initial learning curve has been shaved right down. I think that applies to everything else. I'm getting much better at cooking. I've been using Claude, it turns out, excellent chef, which doesn't make sense because it doesn't have taste buds, but it can give you the global average of the world's guacamole recipes, which turns out is good guacamole. So that's been really interesting, like trying to apply this stuff just for sort of self-improvement. I think that's a really useful skill to have because honestly, everything is changing so fast right now. The only universal skill is being able to roll with the changes. That's the thing that we all need. Weirdly, the term that comes up most in these conversations about how you can be great with AI is agency. People, human beings have agency and we use that agency to decide what problems to take on and where to go. I think agents have no agency at all. I would argue that the one thing AI can never have is agency because it doesn't have human motivations.
00:33:35 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
Sure, you can tell it, "Make more money," or whatever, but it's never going to be able to decide on what makes sense for it to act on next. So I'd say that's the thing is to invest in your own agency and invest in how do I use this technology to get better at what I do and to do new things. [00:33:53] S1: And also to your point, be ambitious. Think big. [00:33:56] S0: Yeah. [00:33:56] S1: There's an interview with Jensen that just came out yesterday where people asked him about layoffs. There's all these layoffs happening. Is AI actually taking jobs? And he's like the reason a lot of these companies are letting people go is they don't have enough creativity or ambition for what they can do with all of these resources there, because they're not letting people go. They have so much they want to do. And obviously easier said than done and it's not always the case, but I think that's an interesting way of approaching. And now that we have this power, people almost underestimate what they can do with it and don't fully lean into it. So I love this advice of just try to be a little more ambitious, try to stuff that you think is impossible and see it might be actually possible. [00:34:32] S0: My New Year's resolution this year was the opposite. Every previous year, I've always told myself this year, "I'm going to focus more. I'm going to take on less things." This year, my ambition was take on more stuff and be more ambitious. We've got these tools. Bring it all in. Let's try and do everything. I don't know if that was a good New Year's resolution, but that's what I went with.
00:34:32 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:32] S0: My New Year's resolution this year was the opposite. Every previous year, I've always told myself this year, "I'm going to focus more. I'm going to take on less things." This year, my ambition was take on more stuff and be more ambitious. We've got these tools. Bring it all in. Let's try and do everything. I don't know if that was a good New Year's resolution, but that's what I went with. [00:34:52] S1: So how's it going so far? How do you feel about this decision? [00:34:55] S0: It's fun. I'm enjoying myself. I think I'll probably get to the end of the year and I'll be like, "Wow, the most important things that I should have been focusing on did not get done," but that's the case when it is my ambition to do them. [00:35:07] S1: It's a converge, diverge sort of situation. Next year could be refocused. [00:35:11] S0: Absolutely. Yeah.
00:35:11 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:35:11] S0: Absolutely. Yeah. [00:35:12] S1: Oh, man. Kind of along those lines, I want to come back to this point you made about how you're working harder and you're fried early in the day. This is such an interesting, I don't know, contradiction almost. AI is supposed to make us more productive. It's supposed to give us more time off. It's supposed to let us sit around and watch Netflix and create wealth and productivity in the world. It feels like the people that are most AI-filled are working harder than they've ever worked. There's this anxiety described of, "My agents aren't running. I got to stay on top of them." What do you think is going on there? Is this just, like you said, maybe it's a temporary novelty thing and then we'll be like, "All right, I don't need to be this productive"? Is there anything else there? [00:35:49] S0: I really hope it's a novelty thing. And I am actually getting much more... I'm getting more time, but I'm exhausted. [00:35:56] S1: Like your brain is exhausted?