The more I use AI, the more I feel like I want to learn new things.
Last week I watched a video from Henrique Bastos reacting to the "purpose crisis" some developers are feeling with AI, and one idea really resonated with me: beyond producing software, AI drastically changes the way we learn.
I've been feeling this in all my projects, work or personal. I've been using it to explore areas I haven't mastered yet, to build small applications, and to explain and help me understand new concepts. I build version 1, ask questions, iterate, test parameters, try different approaches and so on.
That's why, like him, I don't relate to the "one-shot prompt" experience people keep posting about. A pretty demo can be interesting, but what gets me excited is the brainstorm, the experiment and the understanding I build in the process.
He also talks about seeing the glass half full instead of half empty, and I've been thinking a lot about this lately. What separates the people enjoying this new era from the ones who aren't?
So I see 2 traits we should really be exercising that helps us in the era of AI:
- Growth mindset: "I don't know how to do this yet, but I can learn and develop that capacity."
- Agency: "I will take action, experiment, adjust along the way, even without all the answers."
Lately, when I run into something I don't understand, I'm more and more inclined to ask: could I build a small experiment to help me learn it? This has become my default mode now.
To me, this is the most powerful change: the distance between "I would love to understand this" and "I'm going to try it" is so much shorter nowadays, so we should take advantage of it.