Forget the main message about loop engineering, I appreciate the meta message here from Jack Franklin:
when it comes to AI, you must consider the context of who is giving you advice because a person's circumstances can make a huge difference to how they encourage AI usage.
He clarifies his own position with a disclaimer:
I am probably a person with an opinion on AI you should be wary of because:
I work at Google, I am encouraged to adopt AI in my workflow, and I do not pay for any tokens or have any limits on token consumption.
I work on AI features in Chrome Tooling; my job is to help people achieve more with the help of AI.
He notes that using AI at work:
it is easy for me to be so positive about AI […] because I do not see the cost.
Is different than using it for personal use:
By the end of my prompting and usage, I had spent $105.92 […] there was no doubt in my mind that it was not money well spent.
Always a good question to ask on any subject: who is paying the bill?
it's easy to write code you can understand now, but hard to write code you'll understand in six months. The best engineers I've worked with aren't the best because they know every API method under the sun, or because they can turn five lines of code into two with a clever reduce call, but because they write code that they (and their colleagues) can understand now and code that can be understood in the future...
How do these engineers get this ability? Experience. They don't foresee problems because they are able to look into a crystal ball...but because they've been there, done that, countless times.
A good reminder that we’re all here to fail. An “experienced” developer, designer, manager, etc., is just someone who has failed a lot—and learned from it.
This little story resonated with my own experience so much, I just wanted to make note of it—a kind of “hey, somebody else feels the same as me.”
I remember sitting down one evening after work to focus on a side project and losing the best part of the evening trying to get two different tools that I'd chosen to use playing nicely alongside each other. I finished for the night and realised that I'd made no progress...Once I had everything playing nicely, one of the tools would have an update which broke something and I'd repeat the process all over again.