Back in the ’90s, Rob Brown, 48, now director of foundation engineering at employee-experience platform Workleap, wasn’t bagging groceries. He was coding them.
The teenage software engineer in training was working part-time for a supermarket in Ontario, Canada, when he created an inventory management system. Brown used a programming language called Turing, a general-purpose language developed in 1982, to bring his “little pet project” to life.
“That was almost a commercial application in my young imagination,” Brown told us.
If he had to do that kind of app today, he said, he might use a three-tier web-architecture structure, backed by a cloud service, and then integrate a large language model (LLM) to help managers or customers with questions.
On his desk today, Brown keeps a Mac mini for running LLMs locally. With loaded tools like Transformer Lab, he is experimenting with using Workleap’s post-mortem transcript calls as training data for determining the root causes of customer-impacting incidents. Whether digitally organizing grocery ingredients or client headaches, Brown remains curious and wants to apply his skills to the technology of the moment.
“That passion to actually keep up and reapply those skills and to continually reinvent ourselves is important,” Brown said.
Being a veteran software engineer doesn’t mean you can’t vibe with the vibe coders. Programmers who began their coding careers decades ago shared how they’re embracing coding changes and actively experimenting with AI—because that’s what developers do. They keep up.
“When you get into being a programmer or engineer, you have to sign up for change,” John Pettit, 47, CTO at Promevo, told us. “It’s not, ‘I learned one time and I’m done.’”
Hack on. Pettit began his engineering career in the ’90s Windows NT era, he said, building simple apps for companies like insurance offices and automotive shops, using early text editors and compilers. Since then, he’s seen coding evolve with the arrival of integrated development environments, intermediate languages, dynamic web pages, mobile apps, and now agentic AI.
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Pettit recently participated in a hackathon to use Google’s Gemini model to create an AI-powered app that delivers commentary for specific Major League Baseball games. The project combined a front-end of well-known HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with newer components like Google’s text-to-speech API.
A 2024 Stack Overflow study found 76% of just under 61,000 global respondents are using or plan to use AI tools in their development process, an increase from previous year’s percentage of 70%.
Here to learn. Rather than run from AI, Stephen Bennett, 42, director of Soliant Consulting’s cloud-native applications practice, encourages his team of seven coders—all with at least a decade of experience, he said—to integrate AI into their build practices.
Bennett, who started his software engineering career in 2005, and the Soliant software crew began experimenting with LLMs in October 2024. Now they use tools like StackBlitz’s Bolt to quickly generate front-end designs, with “caution,” he noted, emphasizing the importance of reviewing output and securing client data.
“My approach is that it’s not going anywhere. We need to learn,” Bennett told us.
What’s my age again? In addition to highlighting an increased usage of AI tools, the 2024 Stack Overflow study revealed plenty of rookie engineers. One-third of developers surveyed have coded for four years or less. Just over one-quarter of respondents had 15-plus years of professional coding experience.
Scott Petry, partner at PwC in cloud engineering consulting services, says it’s actually the junior engineers who are struggling to gain the benefits of AI coding assistants.
A crew of seasoned coders who know their way around evolving code environments can help bring pet projects to production.
“When you want to build a production-grade app, you still need to have a group of deep engineers who understand the facets of building a good application, getting the architecture right, getting the overall system put together the right way,” he said.