Satya Nadella talked about cognitive coverage in the age of AI, about being able to understand and manage AI agents to get work done as a software developer. The interview from Hard Fork Live covers the future of work and comfort in this new age. This reminds me of a book that the CEO of Redgate recommended, Reshuffle. I love the book, but it's slow reading as I constantly stop and think.

Work is changing; it's becoming unbundled and re-bundled in different ways, and many of us will have to learn to work in new ways. Not all of us, but many of us. Some might see their day-to-day efforts change little; some will not recognize their job a year from now. As with anything, lots of us will be in the middle with some changes, some status quo. That's certainly where I am with AI assistance.

The short version of what Satya says is that there is new glue work coming to software engineers. To me, this is where we re-bundle the work that needs to be done: there is work completed by us, results from AI LLMs, and the glue that puts that stuff together. The glue is managing, organizing, deciding, and probably a few other xxx'ings in there. It's also about understanding what's happening across all the work you are responsible for completing.

That understanding is the cognitive coverage. I like that term as it implies that I need to know the sum total of what's happening from my team, both humans and AI agents. I can grok the way the river of work is flowing.

And it's flowing. It's not stopping. It might be getting wider. I can lightly influence it, but if I don't keep an eye on things, it might go in directions I don't expect and even overflow its banks.

The hosts noted that most people want to know their jobs won't change or how they will change. That's one of the big things with AI that's disruptive and scary. With a machine able to learn and adjust in ways that are more flexible than ever in the past, we have to be adaptable as well. We have to learn to work with this flexible, non-deterministic, eerily human-like technology. It's a scary and unnerving thing for many of us.

AI is definitely changing the world. It's not magic; it's not going to automatically get rid of all, or maybe not many, humans, but it is going to change the demands placed upon them. Getting a grasp of your cognitive coverage of what AI does is going to be important.