While using some agent on some coding tasks that I’m not familiar with — things that always make me uncomfortable — but with enough guidance and having the right words to prompt the LLM, I came to a realization that even with things that I’m not familiar with, I can still produce good results and solve real issues without having enough information or experiencing the same problem before to solve it.

When I really reflected on it, in fields such as Software Engineering or others that are very impacted by AI, experience as a term we were all taught is getting shrinking in terms of importance. Being someone with 10 years of experience or someone with only 2 or 3 years doesn’t make that difference, especially in terms of execution and building things and solving hard problems.

Before the age of AI, being good at what you do or just repeating the same tasks until it becomes well-known so you become an expert in that domain and you are more valuable in your domain of expertise. The following path is not working anymore. If you are willing to follow the following path, you’re going to be replaced by AI easily. The more LLMs are getting smarter, the more trivial tasks become so easy and cheap for them to realize, even at a speed level the human can’t keep up with.

I’m not claiming that experience doesn’t worth anything at all — that’s not my take. If you have experience in such a field, it’s a good booster for your learning, but it’s still not enough. With the pace of AI development, the experience gap is shrinking for experienced folks who are not pushing themselves to use AI in order to discover the very deep areas where their learning has plateaued. In the past, to surpass this phase in learning and become more deep in your field requires consistent effort and time that not many people want to put in.

With this AI technology, the speed of exploring those areas and getting real feedback is getting faster, especially with people who really want to go deeper and learn things.

Someone who is recently graduated or with 2 or 3 years of experience but with eagerness to learn and explore deep areas in their domain of expertise using AI will be more valuable than someone who is relying on their experience to produce value. The market and capitalism reward people who reduce friction and create real value for the business by solving complex problems and moving the needle forward, regardless of your years of experience.

My last take is yes, experience is valuable but it’s not enough. You need to enhance it with AI to get more experienced.

It’s Human Written :)