“When?” you ask. “When does it begin?”
You’ll live this day soon, in just a few years’ time.
—
7:00 AM: The alarm rings. You’ll go to hit snooze. It will say, “No snooze today, sorry.” You set that command for your own good. You’re awake, unfortunately, and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is playing in the background. “Next,” you say. Too early for that.
7:07 AM: Over coffee, you’ll open the day’s agenda. “Fix all the back-to-backs and shift meetings to tomorrow, please,” you’ll say. It will compile a summary of your Slack messages and emails from colleagues across time zones – and you’ll approve a drafted response for each based on the progress made since your last message. You laugh at a video of a woman jamming about butter.
7:45 AM: You’ll be out walking your dog when you get an alert on your watch: DDoS attack detected. Shit. It sends another notification right after: Attack can be mitigated by adjusting Varnish Cache config. You’ll review. Good to go. Accept. Shit! Another shit! – this one from your dog. You’ll pick it up, throw it in the trash bin. It can’t help with that. Time to walk home.
8:10 AM: You’ll miss the first ten minutes of the standup, but It will summarize the meeting so far in bullets capturing the gist. It does this every day, but you notice it has self-improved its method from the day prior. You’ll have a new feature request and you decide to start together after It provides a changelog of the past 24 hours.
8:37 AM: You’ll send your coworker a voice note with ideas for the new feature. It will be listening to the conversation and will get started on spec and mock-ups for both of you to approve based on the transcript without you asking. Looks great, you’ll tell It to go to work!
9:42 AM: Based on the spec you’ve iterated on, you’ll ask It to start writing the new feature. This will require changing dozens of files in your codebase that It highlights for you with a few keystrokes. You’ll prompt It to draft the changes while you review new Slacks and emails.
10:10 AM: You’ll take a look at the code It generated. Mostly right, but you see a few places you’ll need to correct. “Damn, I’ve gotta prompt some code, don’t I?” you say to yourself. You’ll still be team Python, duh. Time for deep work. You and It, yin and yang in the flow state. Coding. Revising. Factoring and refactoring across multiple files. It writes tests, documentation and optimizes for efficiency. Hey now, this IS what dreams are made of.
11:30 AM: Time for a break! You’ll tell It to book a table somewhere fancy and no farther than 5 kilometers from your house for date night tonight. It gets to work and quickly presents some options; you pick your partner’s favorite place. You’ll drink another shot of espresso and catch up on your social feed.
12:32 PM: Back to work. You’ll have an idea in your head to improve the feature that you just can’t seem to get out in code or in words. So, you go grab the back of a party invitation that you certainly aren’t going to attend and sketch the idea on paper. You take a picture with your phone, and It automatically analyzes, runs, and implements the code. Ok. It is cooking.
1:25 PM: It wraps up another set of commits to the PR and you’ll review them. You’ll want to run the app, so you’ll check out the code locally and ask It to install dependencies and fix a problem in your dev environment. The last commit will be yours, but It quickly updates the PR summary. Tests and reviews pass. LFG.
2:01 PM: After deploying, a few bug reports appear. You’ll paste them into a new issue and ask It for a fix. Rinse and repeat. Things have been flowing well today.
4:10 PM: What’s a hard day’s work without a little show off? You’ll ask It to create, record and send a demo of the feature, just to see what your colleagues think of it; or of It? Like a Rolling Stone.
5:23 PM: The work day is winding down. You’ll have about one hour. You’re tired of all your computer games, and you recently re-watched The Fellowship of the Ring. Hm. You’ll pick up your phone and ask It for a playable prototype of a new hobby project: a Lord of the Rings-inspired game that you want to publish open source. Balrog v. Gandalf face-off. Yep, you’re still a nerd.
5:25 PM: Ding. It notifies you: The game is ready. Pretty good. You begin your face-off against the Balrog. You. Shall. Not. Pass! Seconds later, you lose the first round to It.
6:30 PM: You’ll still be iterating on that LOTR prototype when the autonomous car arrives to pick you and your partner up at the door. It will bring you to dinner and you’ll order a vegan pasta dish.
7:37 PM: The group next to you is talking loudly about their new vertical mushroom farming startup. This is San Francisco; some things never change. You jump into the conversation and propose to use It for monitoring and fine-tuning the growth process.
9:00 PM: The car is there to bring you home. But…it’s a beautiful night in September, so you’ll decide to walk instead and talk about good times. No more It today.
—
This is just an average day. One you’ll soon forget, but one that seems no less profound when glancing through tomorrow.
You’ll still be a developer. But one day soon, you’ll live this new developer experience, re-programmed by you and your orchestra of agents, the many “Its”.
And in all this, you’ll live a new human experience, too. Let the symphony begin.