AI Won't Kill Your Coding Career

AI is replacing software engineers. At least that's what the headlines say. But is it actually true?

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick - CEO of Blue Margin and Landon - Data Platform Manager at Blue Margin, get into what AI coding tools are really doing to software engineering teams right now. They cover why developers who tried AI tools in 2024 gave up too soon, how the best engineers on their teams are using Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex to ship faster without losing the craft, and why software engineering job growth keeps climbing despite all the doom and gloom.

If you lead a dev team, work in software, or just want to understand where this is all heading, this episode will change how you think about AI and your career.

👍 Like and subscribe if you want no fluff conversations about data, AI, and running a modern tech business.

Blue Margin is a business intelligence and data analytics firm helping companies turn raw data into decisions that drive revenue. With 120+ clients across industries, their team specializes in building dashboards and data platforms that leaders actually use. 

Learn more at bluemargin.com.

Transcript

0:06

Welcome to the Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson. And I'm Landon Oaks. Landon, last time we met, we talked about using AI tools in just in business but in programming. And one of the things that we touched on was that there can be some reticence for software engineers to want to use these tools for a number of reasons. One, maybe they tried them earlier and they didn't work very well. Or I don't know, they they they had an experience where it seemed like it took more time than it actually saved. But one of the things I've also hear is that there's some people that just love the art of programming. I think of myself as a programmer, I've always thought of it or have a relationship to it that's more like it's a tool. Like the gratification I get is out of building something that works and solves a problem, not necessarily figuring out the beauty of the code, but there are other people that really enjoy that figuring out the beauty of the code. And so I'm sure uh even on your team, and maybe you've had that experience yourself, those types of feelings. I don't know. I I'd just like to kind of talk through that a little bit. And how do you how do you support someone who's got that, but also you want them to take advantage of some of the productivity gains that you can get through some of these tools? Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. I um I'm actually I lean a little bit more towards your camp personally, right? Um, where I I the fun for me is what happens at the end, not so much building it in the first place. Yeah. Um but I do have several, several guys on my team that are more in that camp of the art of the code, right? Um and so I think what you hit on early was was the first roadblock that I saw was okay, they tried it back in August or October, right? Um, of 2025. Yeah. It uh wasn't very good. Uh and so a lot of them just kind of stopped and never returned to it. I mean, they'll use it for like questions and help to do some research, et cetera. But they're just like, oh no, it's it's not good at code. Well, and they probably tried it prior to that, too, several times. So we sort of had people testing it. But what so what haven't after October then? Yeah, obviously it got way better. Um so now it now it's really impressive what it can do. Yeah. Um and so I've been, you know, we're trying just kind of trying to get those guys to get back in there and start using it so at least see that, hey, this is not the same model, you know, this is it works much better now. Um, which I, you know, I've I've shown them a couple of things that I've done with it, which have been pretty cool, taking like, you know, a couple hours when it would have taken a full day of work um to kind of help them get back into that mindset of, okay, this is this is a different game now. It is different because certainly with Opus 4.7, a GBT 5.5, Codex and Claude Code, you can write code much faster. There's still issues, though, that crop up. Like it it can write code that's not as efficient as it should be. You know, it's it's repeating code that um doesn't need to, or I guess it could you know introduce bugs and so on that you don't know about, although frankly you can use those tools for really thorough testing as well. Um so there's sort of a different mindset that has to come into play, I think. Yeah. You know, you're using it to to crank out sort of the rote code that you would spend a few hours writing it can just do quickly. But then you have to be really smart about how you prompt it, what your design is, um, maybe you know how you give the requirements to the tool. And then how are you verifying that it's really good? And I think maybe the art comes into comes back into it in terms of taste. Like there's a certain there's a certain thing about taste in software development. You can see code that works, but it's not nice to use, not nice to look at, um, just feels clunky, and then code that's very similar but is really smooth and easy to use, something like that. So maybe the art comes back in with that. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. That's that's where the background of coding is so huge with AI. Um, you can actually go look at it now and then tell it to make these changes, do something different, etc. Um, which that's actually how one of our one of like my better engineers on my team, well probably the best, um, he uh he kind of got over his. He was much more much more in the art camp, right? You know, he likes to do the code, he likes to make sure it's reusable, it's modular, it's clean, big proponent of that, and he's really good at it. Um how he kind of got over that hump is he uses it in Visual Studio Code now with the extensions. Okay. And he has it like basically when you when you use AI to do something, you can do yes, always do this, or I'm gonna improve every single thing you do. Yes. He is in the I'm gonna improve every single thing you do, because he actually reads it, looks at it. And if he doesn't like it, he'll tell it, no, you need to change it to do this. Or you know, this looks bad, like make this cleaner. Um and he still gets huge gains out of it, but he he still feels like he's kind of in control, you know, and really the orchestrator. Do you think he enjoys that mode of working? He does. Yeah. It's interesting. I I'm more in the YOLO camp. Yeah. Let it roll and then let's uh look at it afterwards. Yeah, yeah. I think for me, it it depends. If it's something that I know really well, I I like the way he does it, because I, you know, I can really make sure that it's gonna be really useful. If it's something that I don't work in, I'm like, just go for it. I'm not I'm not gonna give you any good feedback anyways. Like, it's interesting too, though. If I'm working on production code that, you know, is is critical to our business or our client's business, then I'm not YOLO at all. But if I'm building if I'm building some kind of an application, maybe it's to help me with some kind of business utility, or maybe it's a personal thing, yeah. I'm more apt to let it go and see how it does and then work on it from there. Um and and of course, if you're doing something in production, you've got to review all the code and and make sure it's actually safe and not doing something weird. For sure. So what do you think is the best way to help someone get over that hump? Not that not that they have to, but I do worry that people that don't start utilizing these tools that it could it could hurt them just in their professional career. Yeah. Um how do you how do you think about that? Aaron Powell Yeah, it's a it's a really good question. Um and we're we're still kind of trying to figure it out for so for instance on my team, I you know, we we use AI a lot. I think we could use it more and better. And we're still trying to foster that kind of culture. Um one of the things we're working on now is for lack of a better name, we're calling it AI enablement, um, where we have certain people in the company who have already fully adopted AI. They're they're using it in awesome ways, they're getting incredible gains out of it. Um so we're gonna have those people kind of lead a little bit of a group to uh show what they're doing, show others what they're doing, encourage other people who aren't in that group to also show what they're doing. So the idea is like, let's just show them the art of the possible. Yeah. Hopefully get the the, you know, get the machine turning upstairs to where they're like, oh, you know, I could use this on that problem I had yesterday. Yeah. I hated that problem. It'd be awesome. You know. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think uh I think it some of it is that. Like, let me just show you how fun this can be to be this productive. Some of it I think is uh mindset too. Um, you know, I I definitely talked to people that have, and I've had this, still have it from time to time, sort of the existential worry about AI. What does it mean in the longer term? Um, I think the last few months, people have been very focused on uh the possibility that AI is going to wipe out a lot of jobs. I think more recently, everything that I'm reading and talking to people, it looks like it's actually going to net create a lot of jobs. And um there will definitely be disruption, which is not great for the people that get disrupted, uh, but uh for society as a whole, and even for those people in the long run, there's more to do, I think, not less. And I think in software engineering, we sort of thought, well, AI is really good at writing code, so you don't need as many software engineers, but you know, the hiring of software engineering, software engineers continues to go up. And then I think there's sort of not really false flags, but there's there's indicators in the press, like when someone does a layoff and they blame it on AI. I'm not sure it's actually always AI. Um-COVID, maybe the business isn't doing that well. Um, but going to, you know, if you're a public company and go to the street and say, hey, we're doing this layoff to increase our efficiency thanks to AI. So we're an even better company than you thought, sort of masking maybe we made mistakes in the past that we're correcting now. So I think as people start to see, I hope, especially in the software engineering world, start to see that no, this isn't an Armageddon for software engineers, that people will be, will have less of that existential dread. Um, they may still have the sort of the feeling of, I I don't want to do something that's gonna take away this art that I love doing. If you're a craftsman and you know, you build uh let's say you build beautiful cabinetry by hand, um, it might be hard to switch to working in more of a an automated CNC type environment, um, which I totally get. So I'm not quite sure how you do that, but maybe there's a new art around prompting and writing requirements and how you interact and so on that that could be just as much fun. But you have to sort of get over that hump. Yeah. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I I agree. I think um, you know, it's you're like at least where we're at now, you're always still gonna need that human in the loop. And it becomes critical for that human to know kind of what the AI is doing to where we talked about, make sure that like the taste is there, the aspect the AI is not able to do yet. Yeah. So you're just gonna you know, people are just gonna be way more productive. We're gonna be able to do a lot more things, but yeah, you're gonna always need that person. I mean, if you if you literally turn everything over to the AIs, it's it doesn't go that well in in terms of coding. I mean you can have them, you know, commit and push to to uh to GitHub and and approve its own PRs and all that, but you're just gonna end up with a mess and probably more work or or business problems that you didn't expect. So there really is a still a tight integration with the person to get it right. And and maybe the maybe the hump is to see that, okay, that's actually really fun getting to orchestrate that, and you're still exercising your code mind as you're looking at code and approving PRs and so on. Um but it takes some work to get to that. And we're just literally probably the last five months at the point where the tools are actually really good. Up until then, they were helpful, but had a lot of problems. But around Christmas time, 2025, I think what was it, Opus 4.5, and then we got 4.6, I think, in February, 4.7 now. Or did that happen in February? Anyway, I've lost track of all happening so quickly. And the uh GPT 5.5 and then Codex, their harness for coding, is actually quite good. Um that just changed the game. I mean, it actually is a really good tool now. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. They're they're wonderful now at this point. I um I was a bit of a skeptic at the beginning as well. Now I'm all in. You're not. Yeah. Yeah. I know you're working on things like setting up frameworks for building certain things so that the AIs go down the right path to start with and sort of don't get off track. Probably makes it a lot easier then to look at the code and know whether it's making sense to Yeah. Yeah. And it also kind of gives it like it doesn't have to worry so much about the entire picture, which is part of can be a drawback, right? When it's looking at a single spot and it doesn't know the whole thing's happening over here, right? That can get you into issues. We're um we're playing around with the balance there to because the the other thing is if it has the whole context, you know, unless you're not actually reviewing what it's doing, there's nothing stopping it from changing something, you know, way upstream when you're wanting it to fix something in this one spot. That's the worst. When you have it mostly working, you're fixing the one bug and it breaks other than that. But they're getting better at not doing that. Yeah. Yeah. They are every day, it feels like at this point, anyways. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting discussion. Uh I want to check back in say a month or two and see see how things have progressed. There's something else. Uh you set up an open claw last week. Yeah. Uh yeah, uh got your Mac mini and uh set that up. I've had one for a couple months. Uh we're not using them in business just because there's still a lot of concerns around uh security and and so on there. But that's gonna be a whole nother level of when you're working with uh an even more agentic harness, really, I think. Um I think we're a ways from that, although certainly people just turn stuff over to their open cloud to build things. Yeah. Um I've tried tried that. It it it can work, but you lose a little bit of the connection, at least for me. Anyway, that's something we should probably talk about in the future is you get some more experience with it. Yeah, yeah. I'm I've just barely scratched the surface. It's crazy how deep that that thing is. There's so many options, so many things you can do with it. Yeah. So it's um, you know, I need to figure out where to start at this point. All right, we'll come back to that in a future episode, then when you've had a little time. Yeah, perfect. All right, good to chat. Talk to you soon. Yeah, thank you. Okay.