Future of Developers AI: How the Role Is Changing Right Now

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are getting moving forward, getting into the year, getting unstuck, all those good things. We are building better momentum basically this time around, but we are the Building Better Developers podcast, DeveloperNor podcast, also known as I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of DeveloperNor, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you with a tech reality check before you make that big decision, that big investment. Let's figure out where you're at and is it really a smart one? And if so, what are the things we should do to help that be successful? Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is, this is actually what we'll do a more like behind the scenes one. Good thing is, DeveloperNor, we have got some really, really good interviews. We've had a lot of people we're talking to. Brad is one of them that we'll be talking to here in a few moments. And it's awesome. There's just so much that has come out of these conversations that really want us like moving the ball forward. And there's so many things on my to-do list at this point. The bad thing is it's too much. And we are, as we speak, we are way ahead on the pipeline. And I feel a little bad that that means that some of these people, we talk to them and then you don't hear about them, hear from them until six weeks later or something like that. That's unfortunately one of the downsides of podcasts and making sure that you get guests in and you do stuff timely and things like that. But it is one of those things that we will, we're trying to find ways to work around that and hopefully get that so we're a little more current. But also, it's just there's so many cool people to talk to. Unlike my co-host, Michael, that is going to go ahead and introduce himself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Malash. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as DeveloperNur. I'm also the founder of Envision Q8, where we help businesses streamline their processes by working using the test driven approach to automating your software and working out the bugs so your business performs better. Good thing, bad thing? Well, bad thing is, as Rob mentioned, we do have a bit of a backlog, but we are, the good thing is we are talking to all these wonderful people. Unfortunately, it puts the work on me to get all the editing done. So we have to do these things a little bit ahead of time so that we can actually get things ready for you people and polished. But with that being said, we've already had a good part one talking to Brad and I think we're going to have a wonderful conversation continuing on talking about AI processes and things in this next episode. I agree 100%. And I'd rather us not belabor the point, so we will go right back into our conversation where we were left off with Brad Grohl. Now how do you, because you've got this background and you're talking to people that may not, how do you translate that? I mean, you can talk to us and the developers and say, hey, here's your superpower, here's what you do. But then how do you translate that when you're talking to a business owner that's maybe like, maybe they've got a bunch of trucks and all they're doing is they're a fulfillment company. How do you translate that tech speak, we'll call it, into something to say, hey, let's give you something small and help you understand that you know what you need to know to be able to utilize AI? It's a great question. And before I dive in there for the presentation aspect of it, you can actually make a webpage look like a PowerPoint deck. I put the arrows up in the top left and say make it clickable. And then I put the slide title on the bottom left and then the bottom right's pages, top right's our logo. So you can go full screen in a browser and people will never know it's not PowerPoint. That's just something like say, but translating this to business owners, it really comes down to understanding what that business owner does, what that person does. And that's where the empathy starts. And that's something, again, technologists like myself have always really struggled with. And so if you struggle with empathy, hey, ask Chachapiti or Jim Nye or Grok or one of these, hey, how can I upskill myself on empathy? Because that's going to be the key going forward is understanding the pain points that people have. The company is the most prestigious consulting firm in the world because they start with what problem are you trying to solve? Whenever you go in an organization, that's where you go. What problem are you trying to solve? Where is that friction? And then you just start trying to peel back the onion to understand more and more about them and more about their business. And then you have to just, all the things we're talking about here from a development perspective, then you just need to put it in a manner that they will understand central to their business. I tell people all the time, right now we're more business analysts than we are technologists. I need to understand and I think with AI, that's universal. You need to understand the business of what these people are doing. And that's where I think there's going to be a huge differentiator between the people that are successful moving forward in the technology space and unsuccessful moving forward in the technology space. Because before you only really need to know the technology. If you're going to be an Active Directory expert, you just need to know Active Directory. If you're going to be a developer, you just need to pick your stack and stick with your stack. Going forward, the tools aren't going to matter because those are going to evolve just as fast as the models are evolving. We see it right now. Every two or three years, it's a new stack that's taken over the world. And that's going to happen faster and faster and faster because now there's models building these new tools and new ways of doing things. And so being light on your feet, I say all the time, you need to be able to pivot like any of your favorite basketball players can be able to pivot that fast. And at the same time, you talk to the business owners in that same way. And so understanding, you have to put it in the perspective that the business owner can understand. And the beauty is now you can get a framework up really, really quickly. Before, I would have a discovery call with a customer. And then I'd say in one or two days, I'll have a presentation for you or a framework for you or something like that to show you to get the wheels turning. Now I can do it by the end of the call. I can have my teammate on the call asking qualifying questions. I'm literally vibe coding something during the call using my agentic AI. And at the end of the call, I'll show them something and say, is this something similar to what you're looking for? Are we on the right track here? And people's minds are really blown. And it doesn't take any real effort from us other than just listening and typing that into our agents as we're in a conversation. So coming down to their level and understanding what their pain points is, is the key to all of this. So it's interesting what you just explained there is where I see AI going and it's mind blowing, but it does change the dynamics of the whole business concept, right? Because like you mentioned earlier, you use a cabana board and you're knocking out tasks left and right. The whole current model of business is kind of being flipped on its head. So how are we going to be able to successfully still build businesses, still build for these services? That model seems to be breaking every day now, right? Because instead of like you're really not charging a service for an hourly rate, you're charging a service for a task. So we're now getting back into that task, like cost per task versus cost per hour kind of thing. So it's almost like we need to produce more content, more, I guess, just start knocking things out faster than really dealing with a time to money model, right? How do you see that transition occurring? Or how do you... How should people plan for that? That aren't used to that? So I learned of a term when I worked at Microsoft from about 2010 to 2015 called dogfooding. I'm sure many of you listening now understand what dogfooding is. But dogfooding is basically you eat what you build. And that's how you know whether it's working or it's not working. And to me, if you're going to embrace AI and sell AI and support AI to your customers and to folks like that, you need to be using it every day in everything you do. You need to literally live it, eat, sleep and breathe it. And as developers, you should 100% be equipped to do that. I would consider... I've met genius level developers, like John Carmet level developers in my life had debates and conversations with them. And that skill, I'll put myself a four and a half out of five. I truly, I'm a solutions architect. I like looking at 30,000 of you. I don't like being in the code as much. I do. I wouldn't put myself anywhere near those folks. But at the same time, that also helps me understand all the moving pieces. And I think that's one of the huge things too. It's like we've talked about the people that you want your pixel perfect for design. There's developers who want that same sort of thing. And there's business owners who want to have that same sort of thing. And in the future, you're going to have one or two, three, five, 10 person companies that are worth billions of dollars. That's just, it's going to happen. The technology is already there. Just look what Peter Steinberger, the guy who created OpenClaw, rumors are he sold it in a 20 to 30 million dollar range and he did it in less than three months and he did it by himself and he did it without ever opening an IDE. So you can argue that, hey, you should live in the IDE, you should be the best coder in the world and all these sorts of things. And so just dogfooding the fact that, hey, the development world has been turned on its head. That same thing is going to come to the business world. And so the future is going to favor those bold people who are light on their toes, who are quick and nimble, who can turn quickly. This is one reason I got out of corporate IT is it moves too slow. I have ADD. I need to be challenged every single day. I can't begin calls with 27 people discussing the last sprint. That's just not me. I've got to be doing something new and exciting every single day. And that's one reason I fell into consulting. So I think the mid-market companies, especially so they have tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year, they're going to be punching above their weight class with these tools. And I'm working with them every single day. And as long as they have a leader at the top that understands things and says, hey, we're going to drive and shift the way we do this, everybody's figuring out as they go too. I eat, sleep, and breathe this every day. And I still feel like I'm a fraud. I will be completely honest with you. It was like my first day at Microsoft. I was like, I'm the dumbest person in the room. I've never felt that before. I think that you're going to be living that every day. And that's just the world you live in. And you have to embrace that. You have to embrace that. And I think that's trying to convince business owners and business leaders that that's the world they need to embrace too. That's going to change. What's going to change that is seeing success stories. We can do whatever we can do. We're just little people moving pieces on a chessboard. But at the end of the day, the market's going to dictate how businesses move. And that's coming sooner rather than later. So what would be your number one piece of advice for those that, yes, they have dabbled with AI, but what would you recommend to them? Or what would you tell someone just coming into the AI world? How would you tell them to get started? How would you push them to start using AI versus avoiding the fear factor of it? How would you get them started? How would you encourage them to get started? How would you encourage them to get into this, to start building it, to learn it, and grow their business or grow themselves? I'd say choose one of the services and pay for it. So whether that's Claude, you get the $25. The OpenAI gets the $25. Or what I think is the biggest deal in the entire world is GitHub Copilot. I know people like to laugh at that. For less than $100 a year, you get access to Gemini, Grok, OpenAI models, Anthropic models. And for $400 a year, you get exponentially more use of that for less than $400 a year. For about $300 a month, I have the $200 max Anthropic plan. We have the business OpenAI plan. And I have the $400 for the year GitHub plan. And so for less than $300 a month, I have 10x to my workload. And that's very viable proof because I track it in my open source project, Veritas Kanban. And so my challenge is just pick one of those tools and start building something. If you use OpenAI, then you can use Codex to start developing their desktop app. If you use Anthropic, you can use Claude Code. And then just start building something and challenge yourself to say, hey, how long this would have taken me before? Just something as standing up a new project, standing up to get all the dependencies installed, stuff like that. If you just use that, if you just start there, that's going to save you an hour or two. You just say, oh, and then you just build on top of that and start building something. I challenged, I gave a presentation at Houston AI Club and then also the students at TechCNN the other day, take 30 days. Challenge yourself 30 days. And you know what? Don't even listen to me. Go to your favorite LLM and say, I want to revolutionize my business. I want to upskill myself for the next 30 days on how I can use you and agentic AI. Give me a plan to do that. I have a spare hour a day. And it'll give you a pretty good plan to do that and start there. That's the beauty of this. For the first time, we have a revolutionary tool that teaches us how to use itself. And I don't know any other time we could do this. There's really no excuses other than your time commitment. Understand you may be busy and have kids and all other stuff, but you're going to get left behind if you don't do it. And to me, we're in a lifelong learning scenario going forward. No longer are you going to get a degree for four years, work in the same company for 30 years, and that's it, and retire peacefully. You're going to have to reinvent yourself every 12 to 18 months. That's just the truth going forward. And you have to get comfortable in that. And there's so many free resources out there to learn how to do those things. If you'd like to see my presentations on my YouTube channel where I took it's about 20 minutes long and it's like, this is what I did. And here's the proof to show you how I did it. And if I can do this, you can do this. Because I guarantee most of you listening out there are probably a better coder than I will ever be. And so if I could do this, you could do this. So where do you see with this, where do you see the role of developers in the next couple of years even as the coding becomes really... The coding is no longer a skill. It's really almost disappearing almost immediately as a value. There's no reason to say, hey, I know Java or Python or whatever it is because who cares? Because AI knows that and can generate that faster, probably better than you can. So where do you go if you're a developer that you... Especially if you've been hanging your shingle out about like, I'm a whatever it is, I'm a C developer, whatever it is. Where do you see that going? I think the developers, again, you're already ahead of the curve. You just don't realize it or you don't trust in yourself. You already know the basics. All these models think like you. They were trained to think like you. They all think like you. I follow the same six or seven steps. You have idea, research, prototype, then like a PRD, and then you can use things like a Kanban and do execution and QA. All those things that you guys are used to, the DevOps mindset, that DevOps mindset, that's how these models excel. That's how I'm able to... I've lived that for the last 15, 16 years of my life. And so whenever they just make sense, it understands what I'm talking about. So if you unlock that potential and you focus on building things and learning things, integrating things, I think integration is going to be massive. I think it's always been massive. Again, like I talked about having to get data out of a mainframe, that still exists. There's still 16-bit software out there. There's still people running Windows NT and Windows 2000. All that stuff is... You find a niche, find something there that's going to specialize you. That's a way to differentiate yourself. And then just, I think, being open to tackling any problem. When I was at Microsoft, I was the guy. I was single, no kids. So someone couldn't solve something and I had to be there overnight. I was like, I volunteered. I didn't know that I could do it. I had no idea if I knew I could do it. But I knew when I landed on site, I had 100,000 people behind me at Microsoft that I could reach out to. There's someone there that would help me. So just, I think, being in that uncomfortable, jumping in head first, I think that's just the future. And I think if future embraces the bold, I always thought that was kind of silly. But that's truly... If I think back to... You guys probably remember this, but... You probably had ideas in the late 90s, early 2000s, that you're like, if I would have just seen that through, if I had the time to build that solution, I could have beaten Facebook to market, like just using that as an example. But we've all had those ideas. But ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that matters. And now execution is easier than ever. So if you're an idea person, this is a gold rush for you. You just have to see things through. And I went from never publishing an open source project before, to releasing an open source project in less than a day. And now it's nearly 500 stars. And it's been out for eight weeks, and it's been downloaded 20 plus thousand times. Like, I never would have thought that I published open source. I've always contributed to open source software. I never thought that was me. And I think building a public has been great for me, because it holds me accountable. Doing something open source, just go use these tools. You're a developer. Just go ask it, hey, I want to contribute to some of the most popular open source projects out there. Go scour GitHub for me, find some for me, and then use these tools to contribute to that. And that's just how you get started. That's a great way, too. And again, I like building in public. I share my stories on LinkedIn and Twitter. And I share the good things and the bad things. And that keeps me accountable, too. Because again, if I say I'm going to build something, and it'll be out in two weeks, and people are like, hey, where is that? That makes me stay on that path. Yeah, I think accountability is awesome. I like that you mentioned you use even AI in your tools to help you with that. Very much the same way that that's great. That was actually one of the first conversations I had with AI about how can I get better. Let's get you accountable. It was basically like, OK, you're doing too much stuff. Let's actually finish some things, follow some things through, and be a little less scattered in the approach. A little less shotgun and a little more rifle approach, I guess. All this has been awesome. And as unfortunately, I guess, or fortunately so often as the case, time has flown, just screamed right by for us. With all of this, and I know a lot of people in the audience are just are simpatico with all of this, as they would say. So what is the best way for them to reach out and talk to you if they want to further the conversation, or if they would love for you to come hang out? And maybe they're like, hey, I need somebody to nudge my boss a little bit in the right direction. Yeah, so I'm blessed or cursed whether I have it, but I have a unique name. Brad grew, B-R-A-D-G-R-O-U-X. I've been using my real name on the internet since the late 90s, early 2000s. So there's embarrassing stuff out there to me. But again, I always did that to hold myself accountable. You may find some stuff from video game and sports forums and stuff back in the day. But yeah, you'll find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, all the major platforms, GitHub. I just love talking to people. I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody. If you just reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'll send you a booking invite, and we can just have a conversation. I talk to people just to say, hey, I'm thinking about starting here. Here's where I go. It doesn't need to be business related. It doesn't need to be wherever. I just love being an evangelist. If I had my drugs, I'd literally just be having conversations like this all day long. I tell people all the time, we're trying to create a cult of AI. And cult in a good term here, because the only way I think the future of AI is the individual and the future of AI is open source, and it's living on people's desktops. And open call is the perfect example of that. One guy revolutionized and outdid trillions of dollars in investment from the largest corporations in the history of the world. Just think about that. Peter Steinberger, the guy who created open call, he beat open AI to the market. He beat Anthropic to the market. He beat Google, Microsoft, all of them to the market with his agentic tools. There was one gentleman did that with these tools. And if he can do that, you can do that, because you're a developer as well. So I would say start small, think big. You can listen to our podcast, Start Small, Think Big. It's on all our favorite podcast platforms. It's in video on Spotify and YouTube. And I'm just happy to have a conversation. And again, if you take anything from this conversation, just please give yourself 30 days. And I promise you, if you learn the basics of this, you're not going to regret it. I'll guarantee that. Well, thank you so much. We enjoy having these conversations as well. That's part of why we have a podcast as well, because we can have these conversations on a regular basis. And it's always not only fun, but it's very informative. It seems like every time we walk out of one of these, there's just that many more things that we've got on our to-do list and some things that we learned along the way. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you hanging out. All you guys in the audience and gals in the audience, thank you so much for hanging out. We are not done with this season. We're going to continue on with yet another interview next time around. Although first, we will get our weekly challenge. If you haven't checked into that, if you're only listening to the podcast on Fridays on YouTube, we release the weekly challenge. A little bit of a bonus episode for those that are the YouTubers, the rest of you guys that are hanging around watching us. We'll have a bonus right after this. So all of you, thank you so much. Have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.