Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it in their designs ready for their next job role. I spend probably more time in meetings than doing coding.
Why can't I have an AI that takes my meetings for me?
The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.
Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.
Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.
The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).
That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.
It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.
Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.
Congratulations. But you completely missed my point. I didn't say old people can't be in tune with AI.
> I see AI-native as those who have embraced it
That's not what the word "native" means. In the human language situation I referred to, it's about the language you learned first. It's not a synonym of proficient or fluent. If you learned to code first without AI tools, you are not AI-native by any definition I would understand, no matter how good at using AI you may be.
It's not just "English-native" that makes me think they have this meaning in mind. It's also the term "digital native" that gets thrown around a lot and is absolutely about how old you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native