It's been interesting to see the impact of LLMs and generative AI on all facets of the digital landscape. The way we find information has drastically been altered with RAG search, pulling from multiple sources and providing back a concise and direct answers.
Vibe coding tools have been the most interesting to myself. I've played around with Windsurf a bit recently. Throughout my career I've been engineering adjacent, either as a system admin, technical program manager, or product manager. I love to tinker, I love to see prototypes, I loved being part of any hack-a-thon, but I always felt dependant on others to bring these visions to life. With these vibe coding tools, seeing these ideas come to life, albeit with very basic functionality, has been pure joy.
In no way would I consider myself a software developer. The projects are hacky and probably full of security holes. However I feel more energized about actually building things and playing with them. The frustrations when things don't work is still the same, but I don't feel like I'm spending hours on Stackoverflow searching for answers. As someone who also doesn't have syntax down, a tool that can generate code for you based on language prompts is insane.
There subject is polarizing, at least with in the groups of people I talk with. I'm curious to see how these tools evolve, and how the speed of development changes.