• AI
• App Development

Remembering we're only human: The emotional side of AI adoption

“How do you feel about AI?”

That was the question a friend posed to me, somewhat innocuously, after I’d explained how my role as a senior software engineer was changing. What I realised quite quickly was that I was feeling quite a lot, and that our emotional responses to AI deserve a place in the wider conversation.

Within the Brightec engineering team, we’ve been taking a thoughtful approach to AI adoption. The industry has changed rapidly over the last few years and, like lots of organisations, we’ve been working out where AI fits for us. Most of that conversation focuses on tools, processes and productivity. What can easily be overlooked is how it actually feels to work with. How are our engineers coping with such rapid change? Where are we experiencing growing pains, and how are they affecting our collective wellbeing? Culture and team health matter a lot to us at Brightec, so we’ve been taking these questions seriously.

This post is a snapshot of my own emotional experience with AI: what I’m enjoying, what I’m missing, and how we’re looking after each other as a team while so much is changing.

Change weighs heavy

The role of ‘software engineer’ is changing dramatically across the industry. As frontier AI models get better at crafting and writing code, the day-to-day tasks on an engineer’s to-do list are shifting. I’ve experienced this myself as a senior engineer: I’m spending more time in higher-level spaces like product planning and architectural design, and less time building out features by hand. I'm constantly honing new ‘skill muscles’ that are getting stronger every week, whilst other muscles I once used daily are taking less weight.

Just like real muscle growth, growing pains are common. Everyone in our engineering team is finding their own way with AI. We have a wealth of expertise amongst the team, and AI is reshaping those skills in subtly different ways, so the feelings vary too. Some of us are energised by how quickly an idea can be turned into something real. Others feel uneasy about what it means for a craft they’ve spent years honing, and plenty of us feel both at once. Noticing these reactions matters, because it’s how we support each other and shape the way we adopt AI as a team.

A brief lament

The pace and potential that AI unlocks is undoubtedly exciting, and the ‘system design’ part of my brain is having an absolute blast at the moment! But I also want to pay attention to the parts of my brain that are getting less airtime. I’m writing less code, I’m spending less time building out UI from design, and I’m not leaning as heavily on my language-specific programming skills to write code by hand.

I miss the struggle of being ‘in the weeds’, deep in a feature, slowly growing the codebase line by line into something tangible. I miss ‘flow state’: headphones on, music playing, being hyper-productive and watching the code almost come alive and write itself. If you’ve ever worked on a complex codebase, you’ll probably recognise this slightly euphoric feeling.

For me, the transition away from hand-crafted software has felt a bit like grief. I love building systems, and AI has massively accelerated that process. But I also love the craft of writing clean code by hand. Watching AI models write quality code is humbling, and it has also taken some of the joy out of the process for me.

I don’t think those feelings should be brushed aside. One of our core Brightec values is “Happy and Profitable”. AI might promise speed and efficiency, but that cannot come at the cost of team happiness.

Why humans matter

There’s a new word that has started to appear throughout our processes and documentation: ‘human’. We talk about having a ‘human in the loop’ and weigh up the benefits of ‘human vs agent review’. For the first time in my career, humans are becoming one of several ‘things’ that can tackle an ambiguous problem, and it’s no surprise that this takes time to unpack emotionally. We’re not just thinking about how to integrate AI into our existing systems. We’re thinking about what each of us brings to the table as a human being.

At Brightec, we’re striving to stay ‘human-led’ in a world where that’s not necessarily the only option. We’re currently shaping a set of AI values to guide how we work, and one idea sits at the heart of them: AI can help with the work, but we as humans remain responsible for the decisions, outcomes and consequences. AI should extend what we’re capable of, not replace our judgement. We’ll be sharing more about these values in future posts, so keep an eye out.

Looking after each other

Wellbeing has always been a core part of Brightec’s culture. We’ve written before about how we created HappyTrack to monitor team health. We also have regular ‘buddying’ sessions where team members can share and discuss things openly, and one-to-one mentoring that gives everyone time to reflect on the work they’re doing.

None of this was designed with AI in mind, but it has turned out to be exactly what I needed. Especially in the early days, my buddying sessions became a place to talk through my trials and tribulations with AI. Being able to vent some frustration when something wasn’t quite going to plan made a real difference. My one-to-ones have become a space to discuss and brainstorm how we use AI in our engineering processes, and those conversations have fed straight back into the work I’ve been doing to improve the way we use it.

These things have always been important to Brightec, but they’re even more important during a period of change like this one.

The future

We’ve already learned a huge amount at Brightec, and we’re continuing to adapt and integrate AI into our engineering processes. The whole engineering team meets monthly to discuss new technology, including AI, and we often add extra sessions when there’s more to talk about. Others have been sharing their experiences too: Steve has written about choosing the right tools for AI-assisted development, and Annie about why discovery matters more than ever.

The wheels are very much in motion, but we must keep adopting AI thoughtfully, without losing sight of the human experience. Ultimately, it’s for us to decide how we use AI, and I strongly believe we can strike the right balance - we must remember that we’re only human, and that this is our greatest asset.