Zigging when others zag

There are a handful of skills that I need to get better at...

2025-11-22

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There are a handful of skills that I need to get better at. My current theory is that these skills will have an outsized return in our LLM coding assistant future.

1 - debuggers

I’ve never been much of a debugger user. I’ve definitely used it in the past and I’ve seen the value. However, I’m a console logger and that’s a hard habit to break. I’m going to shift gears and really focus on being a debugger person.

I think this is valuable because we’ll likely be jumping into more code that we don’t understand as velocity increases. Having a bigger note powerful toolbox will help here.

2 - testing

I’m good at testing. I think doubling, even tripling down on testing, test first and tdd is going to be vital. Thinking in tests is just going to be more important than ever.

3 - memory

Not more than ever I think memorizing things is going to be key for our application developer future. It’s obvious to me that having a higher level understanding of the application than the LLM has is vital.

In order to do that you need to have a memory of how the app works and what it does.

4 - frameworks

Doing Rails or React the right way is going to be more key than ever. Really having a knack for how to leverage powerful frameworks for best results is a killer skill. Succumbing to the LLMs suggestion isn’t it. Guiding the LLM to a maintainable, ergonomic future is.

I’m not sure these are the right zigs. If I could zig when everyone else zags with high accuracy I’d be quite wealthy from predicting the future. Nonetheless thinking this way seems useful.