with agents, you don’t have to do all the ugly toil of bidirectional copy/paste and associated prompting, which is the slow human-y part. Instead, the agent takes over and handles that for you, only returning to chat with you when it finishes or gets stuck or you run out of cash.

As fast and robust as they may be, you still need to break things down and shepherd coding agents carefully. If you give one a task that’s too big, like "Please fix all my JIRA tickets", it will hurl itself at the problem and get almost nowhere. They require careful supervision and thoughtful problem selection today. In short, they are ornery critters.

it’s not all doom and gloom ahead. Far from it! There will be a bunch of jobs in the software industry. Just not the kind that involve writing code by hand like some sort of barbarian.

But for the most part, junior developers – including (a) newly-minted devs, (b) devs still in school, and (c) devs who are still thinkin’ about school – are all picking this stuff up really fast. They grab the O’Reilly AI Engineering book, which all devs need to know cover to cover now, and they treat it as job training. They’re all using chat coding, they all use coding assistants, and I know a bunch of you junior developers out there are using coding agents already.

I believe the AI-refusers regrettably have a lot invested in the status quo, which they think, with grievous mistakenness, equates to job security. They all tell themselves that the AI has yet to prove that it’s better than they are at performing X, Y, or Z, and therefore, it’s not ready yet.

It’s not AI’s job to prove it’s better than you. It’s your job to get better using AI

Some of the topics I touch on: Why I believe Vision Pro may be an over-engineered “devkit” The genius & audacity behind some of Apple’s hardware decisions Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment Why the Vision Pro software/content story is so dull and unimaginative Why most people won’t use Vision Pro for watching TV/movies Apple’s bet in immersive video is a total game-changer for live sports Why I returned my Vision Pro… and my Top 10 wishlist to reconsider Apple’s VR debut is the best thing that ever happened to Oculus/Meta My unsolicited product advice to Meta for Quest Pro 2 and beyond

Apple really played it safe in the design of this first VR product by over-engineering it. For starters, Vision Pro ships with more sensors than what’s likely necessary to deliver Apple’s intended experience. This is typical in a first-generation product that’s been under development for so many years. It makes Vision Pro start to feel like a devkit.

A sensor party: 6 tracking cameras, 2 passthrough cameras, 2 depth sensors(plus 4 eye-tracking cameras not shown)

it’s easy to understand two particularly important decisions Apple made for the Vision Pro launch: Designing an incredible in-store Vision Pro demo experience, with the primary goal of getting as many people as possible to experience the magic of VR through Apple’s lenses — most of whom have no intention to even consider a $4,000 purchase. The demo is only secondarily focused on actually selling Vision Pro headsets. Launching an iconic woven strap that photographs beautifully even though this strap simply isn’t comfortable enough for the vast majority of head shapes. It’s easy to conclude that this decision paid off because nearly every bit of media coverage (including and especially third-party reviews on YouTube) uses the woven strap despite the fact that it’s less comfortable than the dual loop strap that’s “hidden in the box”.

Apple’s relentless and uncompromising hardware insanity is largely what made it possible for such a high-res display to exist in a VR headset, and it’s clear that this product couldn’t possibly have launched much sooner than 2024 for one simple limiting factor — the maturity of micro-OLED displays plus the existence of power-efficient chipsets that can deliver the heavy compute required to drive this kind of display (i.e. the M2).