Tech Assessment and Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence
Assalamu alaikum,
Without complaining, and by Allah's will without the slightest worry, I'm still job hunting. I have a few interview processes going on where I'm either waiting for a result or for the next step. One of them is a globally well-known consultancy.
Honestly, after being laid off from a software consultancy job, I want to join a product-led company and, within a stable team, see the results of the decisions I make for mid- and long-term solutions. But given my current financial timeline, I wanted to give this job posting a shot.
On the other hand, I spent the whole day today on a take-home assignment designed to measure AI-assisted development and evaluate how I use AI. Tomorrow I'll demo what I built in a one-hour meeting, and if I can impress the team, that'll be my "ticket" to the next step. I wanted to stress the word ticket on purpose, because this interview will be with a startup in the event ticketing space. Pretty dynamic, with very interesting technical problems.
Instead of saying "I don't have an AI account" for this assignment, I started a Claude subscription for the first time, as a tool this job needs - which, as of today, means I'll be spending an extra eighteen pounds a month :) - and started using it. I finished the project, but I also got to experience firsthand why developers on Twitter/X and other social platforms are now glued to their computers for longer hours. The urge to have a grip on every piece of generated code, to stay at the helm of the directives and dynamic decisions - it's truly an incredible speed, and dizzying!
You have a team that never sleeps, 24/7, constantly reporting back to you on technical decisions you need to make. After a while, as you start offloading those decisions onto the relevant agents, you begin to feel like a tech lead who has drifted over to the founder/stakeholder and business side, who no longer knows what the technical team did to build a feature, and who is feeding that "fear of missing out". The desperate rush to understand the changes before a pull request or a commit ends up keeping you locked to the screen the entire day. Before I was laid off, I was about to work on a client project that would benchmark two teams: one building with AI and one not using AI at all.
I can clearly see the area that AI-assisted coding is disrupting. In the software development profession, people who take a horizontal career path and go deep technically get to those positions through knowledge and experience. AI has already addressed that knowledge and content part. What's left are senior and managerial positions, which is a much narrower space, and most developers weren't on that rung because they want to keep human interaction to a minimum, and maybe for various other reasons. AI is now pushing all of these developers into that narrower spot.
To wrap this topic up: AI-assisted coding is an irreversible tool and workflow automation. From here on, it looks like the debates will keep going: who will carry the companies' AI budgets? Is the developer responsible? Should companies hand out separate budgets to each team, creating competition between them? How should responsibility be distributed?
Side note: in my "side project" post, I listed "the world's best ideas!" that came to my mind. I'm thinking of moving the nook.blog (blogging platform) project forward with AI assistance using my Claude account. I'll sharpen my AI-assisted development practices, and even though it'll be "yet another blogging" platform on the market, I wanted to keep going because I want to fix the gaps I've seen in every other platform and finally have the blog infrastructure I need. It's 2026 and I'm not using Astro, 11ty, Hugo or Gatsby.