What the Heck Am I Supposed to Be Doing?

久しぶり! Japanese has this word, 久しぶり(hisashiburi), that is roughly similar to the phrase, ‘Long time, no see.’ It’s always felt comforting to me as someone who often gets absorbed into things and returns after a long absence. Last May, I started looking for a new home to buy, a whole adventure as someone new to California, and I was working on a little React-based board game asset generator to support a board game idea I’ve been playing around with a friend. It’s not great, honestly, but it was fun to build something from scratch.

In June, I found a new place to settle and moved in in August, then immediately started at a young AI startup, which I left in February due to… let’s say, personality and value differences. As the political landscape shifted, many people in my life have had their lives disrupted. One friend has left the country, another has discussed with her wife if they should get divorced so they can both stay present in their child’s life, and yet another is stretching themselves thin trying to support everyone around them. We’re all more stressed and more unsettled than we were before.

At the same time, tech is playing the oligarch game. CEOs at the inauguration, Zuckerburg’s masculine energy (GPT-4o suggested “gladiator era,” and I’m dying 😂), Meta’s Jan. 7 hateful conduct update, the rollback and de-emphasis of DEI programs, and whatever the hell Elon Musk is doing today. The mood in tech has shifted. To many of us, our leaders and our funders no longer feel trustworthy—not that they necessarily were before, but more people are aware of their flaws. And with LLMs, the very fabric of our work is shifting beneath us.

When I left my last job, I didn’t know what I was going to do, and I still don’t know exactly. But after a bit of time away playing with some project ideas, I had two thoughts:

I’m using the LLM wrong for coding, but I’m not sure how, and
if LLMs are going to do all the coding in the future, what the heck am I supposed to be doing?

And that comes to what I want to do with this blog/notes/experiments thing. When I initially started Humans Build Software last year, I knew something was changing. The name is a mantra as much as a mission: humans—people, with needs, bodies, context, and passions—should drive software development. How we build and what we build are in the middle of a vast, industry-changing upheaval.

I’m a little behind already, so I’ll be catching up on things I’ve discovered already, like:

That time I discovered a much better UX through LLM simulation of a group conversation
LLMs are a mirror you can talk to
When Claude did my (Staff) job for me
How ChatGPT helped me navigate a situation where I was being gaslit
How using an LLM changes my workflow
🌶️ LLMs will make software engineering “women’s work” again 🌶️

As well as sharing notes from experiments I’m trying (some in partnership with Nic Galluzzo) –

Scaffold, a task management app for AuDHD
Quilt, a local, document-based context provider for LLMs
Collaborative AI, a team-oriented chat + document writing experience

I’ll finish out with a bit of call-to-action. What do you want to know about development with LLMs? What do you wish you had time to try out? How are your current tools and workflows failing you? Let’s define a new world of software engineering that works for us.