Over the course of the AI era, there's been this running joke that once an engineer fires off a prompt, they wander off to grab a coffee. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not drinking a hundred coffees a day, so it makes me wonder what people think we're doing with all that "extra" time.
AI hasn't arrived to give us longer breaks. It's arrived to amplify what we can produce. Children in schools aren't chiselling essays out of stone anymore; they're typing on laptops because it's faster, more comfortable, and simply a better tool. Times change, and we evolve with them, or we get left behind.
When my tasks are running, I'm not idling. I'm opening a learning platform, getting certified, digging deeper into topics that strengthen my craft, and expanding the edges of my expertise. AI has given me more surface area to grow, not more excuses to coast.
And honestly, I'm starting to think that over the next year or two, this difference in behaviour will create a real divide between the engineers who use AI to accelerate, and the ones who use it as a cushion. Between the productive... and, dare I say it, the lazy.
