I tell everyone in my life that I’ve had second rebirth since November 2024 — the month that Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Cursor became capable to start writing good quality code.
This article isn’t about how I code with AI (not just vibe coding and not to be confused with it either), it is about the opportunity set that has opened up as a result of this new technology.
1. Learning New Skillsets
What’s beautiful about AI is that quite literally any skill which has been widely documented online is now learnable. Most people are afraid of losing their existing jobs/roles, very few are thinking what are complimentary skillsets you can now learn to make yourself standout and be different. If you expect to keep your current way of life without adapting then that’s a deeper attitude issues you’ll need to resolve.
Little side note, if you do have an issue with the above, give this prompt to an AI and resolve some trauma while you’re at it:
I am a human in the animal kingdom and my worldview relies on the fact that I do not need to adapt my skillset in my environment and constantly be given what I am used to being given. I feel like it is unfair when I have worked so hard to get to where I am. Do not sympathise with me, logically understand my argument from a biological evolutionary point of view and reason through logic. Bonus points if you can help me find the truth. Ask me if I would like the truth sugarcoated or if I want it harsh before going off, king.
I’ve felt empowered by this technology since it has given me a 24x7 mentor for any field that has been widely documented through the whole of human history.
To put this to the test, I’ve been learning two skills: Blender (3d modelling) and Ableton (music making). This outside my core competencies of system building, engineering, psychology, startups, crypto, product etc. However rather than using this as excuse, I take this as conscious knowledge and craft a better prompt to help me learn. So for example, with Blender I asked the following:
I want to learn Blender, the 3d modelling software. However, I do not like overly verbose documentation and am impatient watching through an entire Youtube video. Give me a no bs approach to learning Blender. However, one thing you should note is that I am a competent software engineer (full-stack) who enjoys thinking in systems. Can you translate the concepts you think I’d know into what I need to know in order to learn Blender? Bonus points if you can explain it to me like a gen-z bro that is hella cool and in all lowercase, pls.
Suddenly, this once foreign skill seems far more accessible! If you get stuck at any point you can just take a screenshot of where you’re stuck at and ask it to unblock you. Literally it has never been easier to learn any skill you’ve ever desired. I want to push this for languages too but one step at a time!
2. Simulating Interpersonal Situations
One of the worst things you can do if you’re looking for objective advice is trying to telling your friend a situation while omitting the other side of the story because it makes you look bad. Rather than doing that, you can get help from a LLM to act as a mediator.
To perform this exercise I recommend:
Using Clause voice-to-text so you can ramble what’s on your mind
Taking a screenshot of the conversation to give it high quality context
Important to use Claude and not ChatGPT because you don’t want memory for this task
Once you’ve given your side of the story, create a new chat and ramble about the situation as if you were the other person and the same set of screenshots. Your job is to recreate the other person’s state as much as possible. Give context about their personality from a first person perspective to the LLM.
Then once you’ve done the above try to understand where the disconnect might be coming from and then finally ask it to pass judgement when you think it has all the relevant context.
It isn’t perfect but it sure does help work through situations better!
3. Coding with LLMs
Most people are under the impression you can type “write me a clone of Slack so I can cancel my subscription” — this is extremely dumb and a very limited view of what LLMs are truly capable of doing.
I’ve come up with a rough method of how you should think about coding with LLMs:
Vibe code your way as hard as you can for the first iteration of whatever you want to build. Your job is to simply understand the challenges that you will face as your architecture scales.
Once you’ve seen how to build the thing and get a prototype up, throw the whole code base away and take some time to reflect on how you would rebuild it if you could again. What were the limitations, where was the developer experience, how do you reduce hallucinations?
Rebuild the entire thing from scratch but this time as an Engineering Manager watching the code your AI agent writes. Ensure you accept and reject change aggressively as it writes code for you. Stop it mid sentence if it’s going off the rails, don’t use Claude Sonnet 3.7 Thinking for everything, keep it simple with 3.5. Use chat mode when faced with architectural cross roads.
The above method means that rather than telling the AI “go build this system”, you treat it like an infinite always on junior engineer that is working for you. Getting used to this paradigm of coding is challenging as you really have to know what you’re doing, being able to build systems inside systems all for the purpose of giving context and structure for the AI to operate effectively. Part of this also includes setting up MCPs that can help get this context.
Which leads to my last point, a lot of AI coding is about Context Engineering, not Prompt Engineering. Anyone can write prompts and paste it into ChatGPT, vert few can create systems that give just the right amount of context to a LLM and give the desired result.
Closing
Funnily enough, my conclusion about all the AI stuff is it will force us to become more human rather than less. All processes that have been done before will be automated leaving humans to focus on the things that are novel, human and original. The performing arts, spirituality, human values, religion and all the things that make humanity, will come back into fashion.
If you’re an AI doomer, you will create a mental hell of fire. If you believe it is here to empower and push the human race forward then your second life has begun.
