The key, he says, is to figure out how to get value from genAI assistants despite their failings, by maintaining appropriate control. He frames this as being either in the “boost zone” or the “learning zone.”
The boost zone is “where you can leverage the assistant for tasks that are close to your skill levels and where you can still be in full control,” he stresses. In other words, you’re capable of doing all the work yourself, but you choose to have a genAI assistant complement that work (e.g., you write functions but then have an assistant document what each function does with a three-line description). Because you could do the work yourself, it’s easy for you to verify that the genAI bot is doing it well. It saves you time, but you’re still in control.
The learning zone pushes you a bit out of your comfort zone. This is where you “leverage the assistant to help you at a level of complexity you are not fully familiar with,” Re Ferrè says, though it’s not so far from your knowledge that you’re in totally uncharted territory. Maybe you know how to write a function in Java but you need it in Rust, so you ask the assistant to tell you what that would look like. As he suggests, this roughly equates to “the 2024 version of searching the Internet for something you don’t know.”