Is AI reforming the world? Not yet.

My answer is: not yet. Despite all the help it can grant for individual it still lacks connection to the physical world. There are no reliable enough AI we’d love to grant a pair of hands to do the work.

A couple of months ago, I thought it’d be fun to tackle apartment renovation myself. I thought this is a good journey to leave an IT bubble and learn new perspectives. Despite choosing the balcony, which is likely the smallest room, it turned into a serious challenge. I got frustrated, and my online life, which I’ve been building, is calming down and fading away. It means my focus drifted away and I must adjust it. But before I had to reflect on my own struggles in this article.

Go Get a Real Job

Real-world work is different from the programming and other modern computer-based jobs. First, when program corrupts portion of data during debugging there are backups, that allows to revert it. With physical work, there’s always a risk: breaking something, spoiling it, burning it—you name it. Some mistakes cost more than just time to fix. You may need to restart from a checkpoint and repeat the process.

Many years ago, it became crucial for me to build multiple moving parts into a system that works, then improve, reorganize, add features, and voila! We have a working product. This approach is not working for the physical work. At least I learned to acknowledge the risks that are higher.

I’ve been familiar with manual work since childhood; this is common for people born at the end of the USSR era in Eastern Europe. Tinkering, gardening, and other physical tasks were hobbies that sometimes helped people survive. I think this is why I enjoy automation so much. Despite the fears of replacement due to automation humanity is running towards the new tech revolution.

My struggles with achieving the results put my brain into philosophical mode. I was thinking about the AI and robotic revolution and the fact, that basic and common tasks are still done by humans. Like in the meme, about a wish of AI doing the laundry, not the art.

The 4th Revolution Is Not Here Yet

In my decade in IT, I’ve worn many hats. DevOps was never my main role, but I always welcomed improvements. In case you missed it: DevOps loves automation. And I love it.

But before you love it, you struggle. My curiosity helped, and my imagination envisioned a bright future where everything happens automatically. While "everything" is an exaggeration, automating as much as possible is a great investment. Struggle once—enjoy forever. That’s the beauty of software.

Is “Forever” Long Enough?

Recently, I deployed the MVP I had been building. I thought it was a long-term project, so I did a lot of great things: documentation, containerization, mocks. It felt wonderful to forget many details of the project. It’s truly satisfying when everything spins up from a single command and just works. I even allowed myself to feel proud of the good work I’d done in a month. This distinguishes good software from other kinds of work.

But this doesn’t come for free. Serious work, effort, and time must be invested. A good question to ask is: how long will I use it? This is where the dilemma begins. Many software developers tend to overcomplicate solutions (it would be easier if it were just the code). There’s no great answer, but some portable rules could be helpful.

Don’t Get Lost in the Variety of Improvements

First: focus on results. Do you need it running today? If there’s no template that fits 95%, do it manually. You’ll have to run it manually anyway, so you’ll know how to automate it.

Next: Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. Which 20% will yield 80% of the results? Until you have templates or snippets you’re familiar with, stick to the basics. An automatic build with hardcoded parameters is much better than a complex customizable build that fails most of the time. Taking one step at a time is good enough.

Finally, be aware of what you’re executing. Security isn’t just a 20-character password; it includes maintaining and using passwords properly to prevent leaks. It is not about global policies; it’s knowing the ports and permissions your app needs. These may be just 20%, but they can keep your app running in most cases.

There Is No CI/CD for Deploying Homes

We’ve mastered many areas and revolutionized information exchange. However, we’re still far from that bright future. Hopefully, one day our cars will be fully built automatically, and the walls in our homes will change color while we’re away for a weekend. There could be many improvements to our lives that utilize our existing skills with information. Unfortunately, we lack a proper interface to connect to reality.

In my culture, meeting a chimney sweeper is considered lucky. They are rare nowadays as heating systems evolved and demand has been reduced. I hope the future brings a time when we’ll believe that painters, carpenters, and electricians bring luck as well, despite these jobs could be done by automated systems or maybe robots. But gaslighters (those maintaining street lights) are gone. Let’s believe that other people bring us luck while their occupations exist, even if it’s common.

I need to bring a bit of luck myself and go to sleep so I can finish the balcony. Good night.