Human as Functions

Written 1 month ago

There are three skills which are becoming increasingly more important as a software engineer in 2026: the ability to context switch, the ability to comprehensively read and the ability to ask questions. I define the word "ability" as the act of doing something fast AND with high quality. We must accept some things are not yet be able to be done by AI. It is still essential that humans are looped in either due to lack of context, sensitive information or human communications.

LLMs are functions: they take an input and provide an output. Humans can be thought of functions too: we also do the same things as these LLMs, except we have better context management, an understanding of responsibility if things go wrong and worse general knowledge. The problem is one person cannot work in parallel like an AI: we must be able to sequentially context switch around the AI to be optimal. One signal of being optimal is us having as little idle time as possible. A skill we need to learn is to be able to switch contexts with as little switching time and as little context loss as possible. This means running multiple AI's at the same time and switching between them as they process their data. An important thing is also knowing what to context switch to next. Does this lack of idle time truly lead to higher quality and quantity output by us?

Secondly, a skill which is becoming more useful for human SWE is reviewing code manually. A friend talked about knowledge debt: the fact that we do not know what our code does is dangerous. They say Mean Time To Recovery increases drastically if we do not know what our code does. Knowledge debt leads to technical debt.

These two points above hinges on one major factor: reading fast and actually understanding what you read. The third skill is curiosity: asking questions and probing in the right places. LLMs some time do not think of everything, but probing them in the right places (which means not having knowledge debt) causes them to realize things they haven't recognized, either due to their lower intelligence or bias.