I am not entirely sure if there is an AI bubble or not. People much smarter than me would have more nuanced views on that. I am not sure if AI will revolutionize the workplace, end world hunger, or stop climate change in its tracks. But one thing is for sure: it has had an impact on learning. Specifically, my learning. Even more specifically, what I need not learn.
I am a tinkerer at best and a fumbler at worst. I own more computers (ranging from Raspberry Pis to a budget gaming rig I assembled myself) than I know what to do with. Every now and again, I think of a fun project—setting up a media server, running a retro game emulator, hosting a Minecraft server, or starting a blog. Needless to say, none of these projects are particularly complex. Most people who know what they’re doing would be able to put something together in a matter of days or even hours. But there’s the catch: most of the time, I don't know what I’m doing.
Outside of my day job, chores, and parenting two kids, I only have time to occasionally revisit my projects for sessions ranging from a few minutes to maybe an hour at best. If I were to wire things together by hand, it would be time-consuming, horribly error-prone (and frustrating), and difficult to track. Heck, I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday. I cannot, in any reasonable way, remember what I was doing with a project I haven't touched in days or weeks.
Add to this the fact that many of the tools I use are only "familiarities" to me. Caddy, Docker, Plex—I can vaguely work with all of them, but I’m no expert. I don’t have time to sit through a Docker tutorial just to write a docker-compose file to host a blog. I don’t feel the need to master Docker at this stage in my life. I’d rather spend that time playing ball with my kids.
Enter AI—specifically Claude Code. It has revolutionized how much progress I can make. Not only does it speed things up using technologies I don’t want to learn, but it also keeps track of everything I was doing the last time I touched the project. Everything is one elaborate chat, after all.
This is how AI has blessed my life as an engineer. It helps me build things using technologies I don't want to learn. That might sound like blasphemy to the purists, but there is a joy in seeing an idea come to life and getting things to work. It is a different kind of joy than the joy of learning—but AI lets me pick and choose.