Journal 22 — We Made It Out to the Lineup — Now the AI Wave Is Heading for the Shore

Intro

Hi everybody,

We are already in September, and for most of us, the holidays are over. I hope all of you had a great time with family and friends and are coming back with renewed energy to accomplish all the goals of the new school year.

And maybe because of that, I’d like to make an exception in this weekly journal.

You know, the main intention of this blog has always been to say out loud the learnings, challenges, and accomplishments in my professional career, basically for two reasons: first, to keep a kind of impact log or diary of them, and second, for personal branding.

But this time, I’d like to write a reflection.

Of course, there will still be my traditional journal section, where I will let you know what I was involved in during the last week, but it will not be the central part of this post.

Without further delay, let’s start.

We made it out to the lineup

When I was younger, I was a surfer (*). Good memories from that time.

One of the things I really enjoyed was standing on the shore, watching the waves and trying to find the best path to swim through them and reach the point beyond the break.

To cross the waves, the best way was to dive underwater and let them pass above me. After a few seconds underwater, I would emerge again, but this time the waves were gone. I had left them behind.

Beyond that point, the sea was calm. I could sit on the board, look back at the shore, and wait for the moment when I wanted to start surfing a wave.

Regarding the AI disruption in tech, I think we are now at the point where the waves are passing above us.

I am already an old tech guy: 25 years in the business (I turn 50 next year), and I can tell you I have seen a lot and learned to roll with the punches, surfing each wave as well as I could.

True, this is a big one.

At the time of writing this post, ChatGPT 6 is here, together with all the clickbait videos on YouTube proclaiming that AGI has arrived, that it is insane, and all the other catchy headlines.

But as a tech guy, in my daily work, current frontier models are already doing a great job writing code. When there is an error or an inaccuracy, it is more often due to missing context than to the LLM architecture itself.

I don’t expect to see huge improvements in coding with this new iteration. This use case is already largely solved.

If we talk about automation and computer use, AI already uses my project management tool of choice to handle part of the daily work autonomously. I also barely go to GitHub anymore except to review and approve PRs, as everything is connected through MCP.

Slowly but constantly, I am automating more and more tasks with the help of AI, and I plan to go deeper into computer use with this new model iteration.

Yes, I am more productive, and I don’t see myself being replaced by AI. On the contrary, AI is pushing me to think much more about strategic decisions than before.

Actually, I feel kind of stressed about it because I am the one restraining the power of AI. But as long as the ownership of what is built falls on me, that responsibility is mine.

So I see the waves already behind me.

But the waves are still there, and they will eventually hit the shore. And I think there is a bunch of people who are completely unaware of it.

The reality is that tech is an exception. We are used to being constantly exposed to new technologies. We almost have no barriers against change.

But this is not true for many other professions.

My friends who work in other areas — lawyers, practitioners, teachers — use AI, when they use it at all, only at a very superficial level.

When I talk to them about their daily work, I see lawyers who don’t use LLMs at all, tax accountants who can barely tell you the difference between Claude and ChatGPT, and teachers who mostly talk negatively about AI.

In the public sector, from what I hear from friends, it is even worse.

I don’t know whether they will be hit hard by the wave.

Many of those industries and sectors have legal barriers protecting them, and they will use every means at their disposal to protect their jobs.

Think about taxis, for example. Autonomous taxis could have been a reality for years, but local taxi drivers have managed to stop or slow them down, with the help of governments and local institutions, in many cities — at least in Europe, where I live.

Something similar happened with blockchain technology, which theoretically could have sent notaries into oblivion.

Having a disruptive technology is no guarantee of adoption.

People organize themselves into very powerful lobbies that pressure governments in one direction, and governments also respond to their voters.

But all of this is another topic.

What I do know is that we will probably be among those leading the change.

We just have to wait for the fog — the uncertainty — to dissipate, sit calmly on our boards, look back at the shore, and watch the waves hit it.

What I achieved this week

This week I worked hard helping the team reach the deadline.

We had too many things on our plate, especially finalizing a couple of customer-facing services, so we put most of our resources there. As a result, nobody was taking responsibility for building the infrastructure.

So I did it.

I built staging environments for most of the services we are using with AWS CloudFormation and CDK.

Did I tell you I love them?

It is a breeze to build infrastructure with CDK, knowing that everything is documented out of the box and, even more importantly, that decommissioning a resource can be as easy as removing a few lines of code.

It makes everything so predictable and easy to maintain that I don’t know why nobody thought about it before.