Our colleague Jacob shed a light on working with AI in a post he wrote back in June, Contemplations. One of his points was that, with AI being more and more ubiquitous in our work as software developers, sophisticated programming concepts are starting to become irrelevant. The AI doesn’t care how elegant the code is, it spits out something that works. In the end that’s what matters to the business; it just works.

I learned about Rich Sutton’s "Bitter Lesson" recently, and I can’t help but draw parallels between the work on the cutting edge he describes and our daily work using AI as software engineers.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on a rewarding journey. As a Managing Director who is no longer a full-time software developer, finding the time to code and keep up with the relentless pace of new technologies is a real challenge. While my colleagues are experimenting with the latest frameworks and tools daily, I know I’m not alone in feeling that the tech landscape evolves faster than the hours in a day allow — or faster than what client projects typically permit you to explore.

That’s why I cherish internal projects. Earlier this year I posted about Posting our blog feed to social networks using Slack. And recently I set out to build a couple of internal tools for our Google Workspace environments, but I decided to try something different than what maybe most developers would do.

Instead of relying solely on traditional documentation or enabling an autopilot AI assistant directly inside my IDE or terminal (like a Claude Code subscription), I used the standard Google Gemini web client. It comes included with our company’s Google Workspace account — proving that you don’t need expensive premium subscriptions or complex local LLMs to get value.

The living room was dimly lit, with the only source of light being the glow of the computer screen in front of a young woman. She sat cross-legged on the floor, headphones on, typing away furiously. Her grandfather, a wiry old man with a thick beard, sat on the couch behind her, watching her work with a sense of pride and wonder.