I for one welcome our new AI helper.

I was lucky enough to have started my career in a small company and then in a start-up. Both provided me with an environment perfect for learning. I sat with experts who took time out of their day to help answer my questions. From them, I learned the basics of what I still use today.

I’ve built on those foundations, but things would have been much harder if I didn’t have those foundational moments of my career. I’m not just talking about technical skills, the mentoring on how companies work, consulting and how to be better generally.

But those technical skills were also a big part of it – and a part many people miss out on in their careers. The rise of Large Language Models like ChatGPT4 is rapidly helping to fill that gap – where people don’t have a technical mentor who can explain and help work through those technical problems.

I’m no longer that junior team member – asking the dumb questions (OK, well usually I’m not) but even I find Chat GPT excellent at consolidating a broad set of information that would previously have taken many google searches and hours of trial and error.

The remote working junior who maybe finds it harder to get that initial help and feedback from the old guy next to them (who no longer exists – at least not immediately next to them) - now has an expert available 24hrs a day – fluent in all the programming languages and tools.

That free’s you / us to focus on the things that matter in our work – creating products that work better and doing it more quickly.

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