Isn't that more human?
The general impression is that AI, and perhaps GenAI in particular, is making things less human. I still have plenty to experiment with, and we all have an infinite amount left to learn — but so far, my own experience suggests otherwise.
With coding, at least, GenAI lets me spend more time on the parts of software development that are most human: design, gathering and clarifying requirements, and communicating with people of different technical backgrounds so that everyone shares the same goals and expectations. Translating all of that into code matters, obviously — but it's only one part of the work, and it happens to be the part GenAI is good at. That's not a new observation; others have made it more profoundly than I can. What I want to write about is smaller and more personal.
Not alone with the hard part
The first thing I noticed was that I worried less. Before, when I was designing something that would lean on a library I'd never used — say, FastAPI — I'd start fretting about the integration details far too early. I'd lose focus to a detour through the documentation, an examples search, a pile of Stack Overflow opinions. The detour added nothing to the task in front of me. It just added anxiety and burned time.
GenAI makes that particular worry disappear. You know that when you get to the unfamiliar part, you won't be alone — you'll have a helping hand, metaphorically speaking. Isn't that, oddly, more human?
The part that's actually mine
On a more personal level: one of the things I'm responsible for, by choice, is helping care for my mother. Whatever I'm doing — day, and sometimes night — I need to be ready to switch context and attend to her before returning to it.
Doing things the old way, I'd lose focus quickly, then spend an extra fifteen or twenty minutes per interruption just rejoining the flow. Three interruptions could cost me a full hour during the most valuable stretch of the day.
GenAI doesn't solve that completely. But here's what I've been trying lately. I start with the whole picture — the design, the requirements, what testing and quality actually mean for the work at hand — and I write it down in something I can reference and keep updating. Then I break the work into a sequence of tasks, ordered by priority, and hand them over one at a time. That lets me separate the hard work that needs uninterrupted focus from the work that's more resilient to being interrupted.
From there, Claude Code takes one task at a time. I don't have auto-switching turned on — I'm old school 😊, so I still check and reflect after each task. "Tawfic?" "Yes mom, just a second." Hit enter, get up, do whatever's needed, come back. By the time I'm back, it's either done or nearly there. Little context switching, and if I've lost the thread I can just ask for a quick recap.
I'm less anxious and far less stressed. My mother is happier, too — she no longer has to listen to me negotiate about the sacred hours when I mustn't be interrupted unless it's really, really urgent. Everyone's happy, or at least content. Isn't that more human?
P.S. I was interrupted once while writing this. I took her out for a bit of exercise, and she confiscated my tea — which is more than fine by me.