Today, we can clearly see how fast AI is growing and becoming smarter in helping humans with many kinds of work. A lot of people are afraid of AI because they worry their jobs will eventually be replaced. I used to think the same way.
Back then, I decided to learn coding to improve my income and hopefully get what many people considered a dream job: working remotely. Unfortunately, after spending quite a lot of money on a coding bootcamp and finally feeling ready to enter the tech industry, the tech winter arrived in 2023.
Every month, the internet was filled with news about massive layoffs in tech companies. Seeing that situation made me confused and discouraged. Eventually, I stopped applying for jobs and decided to focus more on freelancing instead.
At first, I was very idealistic. I did not want to depend too much on AI. I preferred searching for tutorials or reading documentation because I wanted to fully understand what I was building. But over time, I realized that this process was simply too slow. Competition in the real world does not wait for us to perfectly understand everything. Most workplaces care more about results and speed.
As someone who is already in his 30s, I also realized that I no longer have endless free time just to spend hours reading documentation on the internet. That mindset slowly changed the way I approached technology and work.
Eventually, I let go of my idealism and started using AI more often to help me code and finish tasks faster. And then I understood something important: in the AI era, technical skill alone is no longer enough.
We now need other skills to stay competitive, such as creativity, communication, marketing, SEO, and problem solving. For coding itself, I still believe understanding the fundamentals is very important. When bugs happen, we still need to know how to identify problems and think logically to solve them. AI can help us, but humans still need to provide direction and decision-making.
I also came to another realization: in this AI era, everyone can almost have their own “worker,” and that worker is AI. Of course, AI still has costs, whether through subscriptions or tokens, but compared to hiring many people, it can become a very affordable and powerful tool. The important thing is how we use it to grow, both personally and economically.
Today, we live in an era where one person can build many things independently. AI can help us learn, organize information, solve problems, create applications, and even build businesses. Because of that, the most valuable skill today is not only technical ability, but also creativity and the willingness to keep learning, especially learning how to use AI effectively.
In the future, it may become normal to see large companies run by only one or two people with the help of AI. AI might even help humanity create technologies that improve life dramatically, perhaps even helping humans live beyond Earth someday.
In the end, I believe AI development is something humanity truly needs. This technology has the potential to help people create a better future and a better life. I just hope AI will continue to be used to support humanity, not harm it.