Leveraging Ai In A Changing Tech Landscape

The Artificial Intelligence Boom 🎆

There’s a lot of speculation around Artificial Intelligence and whether large language models (LLMs) will eventually replace software engineers. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but it’s definitely changing what it means to be a modern day engineer. AI’s capabilities continue to grow, and we’re living through an exciting new technical era. In this post, I’ll share my perspective on AI and how I personally use it in 2025.

Before AI ⏪

I started my career a few years before the AI craze or before ChatGPT was mainstream. Back in university, we didn’t have LLMs. We had good ol Slader (shoutout to Batman) and Chegg (if you were lucky enough to know someone with an account). When you hit a wall, you’d rely on those platforms to study other people’s solutions.

When it came to programming, getting unstuck meant relying on your “Google-fu” skills. Searching Stack Overflow, digging through GitHub issues, and piecing together online documentation to figure things out.

Now, students can use ChatGPT to write essays, complete homework, get explanations, and to act as a personal tutor. With the right prompt, it can return a working solution in seconds. And while that can be a shortcut for some, I believe engineers should leverage AI as a tool to expand our technical abilities, not replace them.

Sure, students can cheat with AI. But like any powerful tool, AI is a double-edged sword. If you rely on it too much, you risk losing your edge. You stop thinking critically. You become dependent. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We can choose to use AI to deepen our understanding, speed up learning, and build better systems. How we use it is what truly matters.

Why AI Makes Me a Better Engineer

AI has raised the bar for engineers. I feel the need to constantly improve because of it and I welcome that. I use AI to get things done faster and more efficiently, but also to stay current with modern tools and approaches.

In today’s tech world, it’s not always the most knowledgeable engineer who thrives.. it’s the one who can learn quickly, adapt fast, and deliver effective solutions.

I view AI as a:

• Tool that extends my capabilities
• Personal intern for grunt work
• Mentor when I’m in unfamiliar territory

Let me explain each of those roles.

The Intern That Helps Me Move Faster 🤖

LLMs are great for simple, repetitive tasks. Need a quick script to parse data and export it to a CSV? Let the AI generate the boilerplate while you focus on the bigger picture tasks. Like how to visualize that data or integrate it into your system.

Offloading small tasks to AI frees up time and mental energy. This saved time lets me focus on what matters more like system design, architecture, and solving real problems.

This shift has made me think more like a software architect, breaking problems into smaller components and piecing the higher level components together nicely to create a clean design.

The Software Architect: Structuring Better Solutions 🏗️

When engineers offload boilerplate work to AI, we can focus on code structure, design patterns, and modularity. AI becomes the worker, and we become the architects.

But that doesn’t mean we blindly trust the output. The engineer must:

• Review all generated code
• Understand it fully
• Refactor as needed

AI isn’t perfect. Sometimes its responses are off target or completely unrelated. That’s why writing good prompts and having a strong technical foundation still matter. If you don’t understand the problem yourself, you won’t get the right solution from AI.

The Mentor That Teaches Me 🧑‍🏫

This might be my favorite use of AI. When I’m unclear on a topic, I use ChatGPT like a teacher:

• I ask it to explain concepts
• I request analogies
• I have it quiz me or walk through examples

In my current role, I relied on AI heavily during the onboarding process. It helped me quickly understand mathematical models used in the sensor devices we were building. Instead of asking a teammate to walk me through it, I used ChatGPT to get up to speed which saved both my time and theirs.

Honestly, I now think it should be mandatory to ask AI before escalating questions to others. It’s a time saver, a learning accelerator, and an on demand tutor. You can learn nearly anything if you ask the right questions.

A Powerful Tool And Ally 🔧

To me, AI is like a powerful calculator: a tool, a resource, and a productivity booster. It’s also a double-edged sword. It can amplify our capabilities or make us complacent depending on how we choose to use it.

It’s crazy to think that Google search once felt untouchable, and yet here we are. ChatGPT and other LLMs are quickly becoming the go to for knowledge, code, and problem solving.

This is an exciting time in tech. AI is here, and it’s changing the way we work, learn, and grow. My goal is to continue evolving alongside it to stay sharp, adaptable, and curious.

Cheers 👌