by David Simmer | at Minnebar 19
The “paradox of automation”: when a formerly-human-operated system is automated for safety or convenience, any failure in that system can result in a worse outcome than before, because the humans who could avert the failure haven’t needed to understand the system.
If you’re a a software engineer in an era of amazing AI code tools, there’s no escaping this choice. Will we prioritize convenience over learning? Is it even that stark a choice?
Let’s talk about these tradeoffs, and what they mean for junior engineers and experts alike.
David Simmer is a designer and engineer with a couple decades of experience building for people who use the web. Homeschooled as a kid, and having shifted to working in tech as second career, he's had a weird and fortunate career journey.
Most recently, he's been a fullstack engineer at Netflix for 5+ years working on a wide variety of efforts: GraphQL Federation, unifying UX across internal tools, improving the experience of software migrations large and small, and cross-functional projects that make other engineers' days better.
After five years away in California, he now lives in St Paul with his wife Cleo and two rescue dogs named Chuck and Greta. Among other hobbies, he plays piano, mountain bikes, skis, and is learning to build cabinetry.
Website: https://simmer.ooo
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