But AI is a different beast. And it requires a lot of the skills I have never quite grokked (like networking, for example; and non-database security too.) When you get some (ok, a lot of) experience, you tend to get to a point where you know what you know. This leads to a fear of whether you don’t have the aptitiude (and never did), or you are reaching this level in life. You don’t need to be super experienced either. Doubt and fear are there when you see the “kids” (a term that changes as you age greatly) doing these amazing things.

Can I not learn AI, or do I just don’t really want to.

Right now I believe I don’t want to. It isn’t like I am not learning new stuff and creating new software every day. I am learning a lot about Microsoft Fabric and not only the T-SQL interface even though I am mostly focussed on a single aspect of it right now, you can’t do everything in T-SQL and I am starting to learn more and more of how things work.

In other words, I don’t fear learning new stuff.

I won’t begin to pretend that I love it sometimes either. I was watching a demo of how AI was being used to document some code the other day, and I just don’t know if I want to or can learn how to do that any more than I ever really wanted to be a C, C++, C# or whatever programmer. I did some VB programming and VB.NET, and it just never clicked. Data on the other hand, felt like second nature.

For now, let’s just call it a preference

Sometimes I just feel like I am getting behind because I don’t want to dig deep into AI instead of just letting it be my assistant. I see people writing documents with it, building their schedules, writing code, summarizing emails, and that is great I guess, but it just isn’t for me.

I probably could figure it out given time, but while I don’t write code as fast as AI does, It ends up doing what I want it to do in the end. Like the code generation tools I have been creating. Could I have asked for the output from an AI tool? Yes, with a lot of arguing with a machine (which I am happy to do with the Taco Bell app (Or just last week Dollywood’s app trying to get a special ticket to ride their new ride and attend the media event).

But my code generator will let me control the types, names, transformations, etc with simple, deterministic, changes of data. And that is what I prefer when I am on call and the phone rings to tell me that something has broken.

Deterministic code generation means not arguing with a machine that it built my code wrong or spending days setting up for a task that could be done in seemingly less time (of course, if you have large numbers of things to do, AI at least will do it faster.