Is this thing still on?

Apologies for being away so long. I’ve been busy finding joy in things other than “tech” but I felt a need to talk about a recent realization. For developers “getting on a bit” it’s easy to fear that the skills we’ve spent years acquiring are becoming redundant. I certainly felt that way.

I treated AI as a threat, so I did what I usually do with threats I don’t understand: I ignored it and hoped it would go away. Well I think even if you’re not a fan of AI, we can both agree the ship has sailed on that one.

Regardless, looking back at my work this year, the volume and quality of what I’ve delivered has actually improved. Q4 was tough though so like all well adjusted programmers, I treated myself, to some programming where I’m my own product manager, and it felt remarkably like “Pair Programming” sessions of old. What a luxury that was eh? Sitting beside another human being, wrestling with contradictions and refining the logic live on a shared screen, each with a keyboard ready to jump in if the inspiration strikes and you just had to take over and share it.

Apart from the obvious lack of human connection, pairing with AI was actually even better (no offense to my old colleagues). It was the ultimate pairing experience, available 24/7, patiently explaining concepts I struggled to grasp. Recalling the half-baked ideas I’d half-remembered while the focus shifted elsewhere. But it goes deeper still. Play around with it for a while, and you realize you can use it to simulate different personas which makes it easy to get different perspectives on the problem. Using these tricks felt like like tapping into a deep well of intelligence. It felt I just had to keep clarifying my intent until it could be packaged into something my team could use.

The “Latent Space”

There is a technical term for this magic place I found myself in: Latent Space.

It’s a mathematical space where a model stores the essence of what it has learned. Think of a library where books aren’t sorted by title, but by their internal logic. In this space, a concept like “Distributed Systems Resilience” might sit right next to “Risk Mitigation in Financial Markets.” On the surface, they are different fields, but they share a core DNA: the management of chaos through structural guardrails.

The latent space is “scrutable” to the machine but “inscrutable” to humans. We can’t easily look at a vector like [0.12, -0.98, 0.45…] and say “Oh, that’s the part that handles recursion.” However, we can navigate it as explained by Kaan Karaman in understanding latent space

When you give an AI a prompt, you are essentially giving
it a set of coordinates in this massive, invisible map of
human knowledge. The AI then "decodes" the path between those
coordinates into the syntax (code) you see on your screen.

As a developer, I’ve started thinking of myself less as a coder (nevertheless a role which I have and will always hold in high esteem) and more as an “Intelligence Miner” expertly navigating to where the rich deposits are. I used to worry that being “niche” was a liability, but in this new world, it’s a strength. My experience acts as a filter; I’m not just digging for code that’s “good enough for government work”. I want to find the good stuff (latent space switch) distilled from pure mountain water near a peat bog. And as the AI helped me realize, I also “have the complex “latent space” of my own history” for all it’s ups and downs that help me navigate (or hinder if I let it) directly to the structural truth of a system.

The Downhill Descent

Lately, I’ve been neglecting my usual passion—hill running—because I’ve been so fascinated by exploring these hotspots of meaning in latent space. But as I sit here trying to wrap up this post so I can go for a run, AI has got my back here too! It told me how my favorite activity is really like coding with AI.

Specifically, using AI feels like the downhill segment of a hill race. It’s that frantic, thrilling moment where gravity takes over and you’re just trying to stay balanced and upright while moving at a speed that feels slightly beyond your control. You’re navigating dangerous rocks and (latent space backref) hidden peat bogs, reacting instinctively to the terrain. The “latent space” is the mountain, and the AI is the gravity—it provides a terrifying amount of momentum, but you’re the one choosing the “line.”

In truth, some of this writing was inspired by Google’s latent space and some of it came from deep within the latent space that only I will ever know. And that, my fellow Carrie Bradshaw stans is the magic of AI.