Professional Development – 2025 – Week 34

Context is everything (your new intellectual property).
MCP is everywhere (B2A economy).
Make your sites easier for LLMs to understand.
Engineering team = agents + humans.
Engineers are orchestrators that focus on systems thinking and problem decomposition.
(Personally, I take the hype around AI — agentic or otherwise — with a grain of salt. I’m wary of people that say “X is dead” and present no downsides to a new approach. Also, it seems most of the buzz in AI is around what I’ll call non-enterprise companies. One solution does not fit all.)

When things are uncertain is where empathy and human connection are needed most
Empathy among top leaders is being treated as a “nice to have”
Using AI tools that seem empathetic is “empathy-washing” — a nice but hollow gesture
Nearly half of GenZ employees received better career advice from ChatGPT than from their boss
LLMs are products not people, and there are real dangers of tech companies using LLMs weaponizing empathy to manipulate or addict people

Vibe coding is for throwaway tools and one-offs; not for longevity
Give me possible solutions, not one answer
Take advantage of LLMs being trained on research: Recommend 20 regex engine optimizations
Be concrete about what you want
Use it as a rubber duck
Have it create lots of documentation which you edit down
Automate trivial things that you could do but don’t want to do
How can I make this more computationally efficient?
I’ve made 2 changes. Do the rest in that manner.
Take a troubleshooting email and ask Copilot to find the error in the code
(They use Claude)
Assign Copilot Coding Agent to things that are low priority to keep issues from aging
(Fair amount of sloppy presentation — scrolling through massive LLM responses, GitHub issues, and PRs; presenters can’t seem to operate presentation tech; got lost in the nerdy weeds that aren’t relevant to the topic; laughing at code written by previous developers that they don’t know and also aren’t around anymore)

“Times of major change present the best opportunities to make changes that stick on the personal front.” People are most receptive to break/form habits when everything is already changing.
Select a shovel-ready idea (i.e., well-planned and ready for strong execution), then reframe the idea to show how it addresses an immediate problem and has long-term value.
Speed matters.
Size matters — the typical approach of small tests/pilots is for when things are stuck in status quo. (You still need a plan and to acknowledge risk.)
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Geoff Mazeroff