Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.

I think there's a similar analogy here for products in the AI era.

Bolting AI onto existing products probably doesn't make sense. AI is going to produce an entirely new set of products with AI-first creation modalities.

You don't need AI in Photoshop / Gimp / Krita to manipulate images. You need a brand new AI-first creation tool that uses your mouse inputs like magic to create images. Image creation looks nothing like it did in the past.

You don't need Figma to design a webpage. You need an AI-first tool that creates the output - Lovable, V0, etc. are becoming that.

You don't need AI in your IDE. Your IDE needs to be built around AI. And perhaps eventually even programming languages and libraries themselves need AI annotations or ASTs.

You don't need AI in Docs / Gmail / Sheets. You're going to be creating documents from scratch (maybe pasting things in). "My presentation has these ideas, figures, and facts" is much different than creating and editing the structure from scratch.

There is so much new stuff to build, and the old tools are all going to die.

I'd be shocked if anyone is using Gimp, Blender, Photoshop, Premiere, PowerPoint, etc. in ten years. These are all going to be reinvented. The only way these products themselves survive is if they undergo tectonic shifts in development and an eventual complete rewrite.

Just for the record, Photoshop's first generative 'AI' feature, Content Aware Fill, is 15 years old.

That's a long time for Adobe not to have figured out what your are saying.

Photoshop is unapproachable to the 99%.

A faster GPT 4o will kill Photoshop for good.