A real pleasure to chat with John Durrant on Friday. As the name of his consultancy, Human-centric Engineering, will attest to, he’s someone who has long understood that technology is fundamentally about people rather than code.
We had a fascinating conversation incorporating a holistic look at the impact of AI, as well as some great insights into how fasting can make you a better engineer.
This will be my last ‘proper’ post of 2025 - over the next couple of weeks I’ll be intermittently sharing a selection of my articles from the last year or so I’ve been writing here.
I’ve published 230 posts to date, so I have a few to choose from :)
Thanks again for subscribing and reading Engineering Harmony. I’m always curious about the folks who tune into these daily explorations, so if this time of year has got you feeling generous and you appreciate this newsletter, I’d love to receive the gift of your feedback.
In the meantime, wishing you all a wonderful festive season, and I’ll see you in the New Year!
Can Experience Survive the AI Revolution?
John Durant has been programming since the 1980s, lived through the birth of the internet, and built everything from games to entire businesses. But two months ago, something changed. After years of consulting on human-centric engineering, he picked up Claude Code and felt something he hadn’t experienced in decades: the pure joy of being a beginner again. The question isn’t whether AI will transform engineering—it already has. The real question is how veterans navigate this moment when all their accumulated wisdom suddenly needs updating.
AI Summary
This conversation explores how experienced engineers are navigating AI’s rapid transformation of their profession. John Durant shares his journey from skepticism in early 2024 to experiencing profound shifts in how he builds software just months later. The discussion reveals a central paradox: as AI handles more implementation work, the value of human contribution shifts toward higher-level thinking, strategic problem-solving, and surprisingly, embodied practices like fasting and movement. Rather than making experience obsolete, AI is forcing a redefinition of what expertise means—elevating those who can think architecturally, maintain context, and solve problems at a human level. The conversation concludes with adaptability emerging as the critical skill for engineers, not just in tooling but in cultivating practices that support the kind of thinking AI cannot replicate.
Chapters
(00:00:47) - From Spectrum to Claude: A Career Spanning Computing Eras
(00:02:04) - The Performance Gains We Never Expected
(00:04:44) - Coming Back to Code After Five Years Away
(00:06:21) - We’re All Juniors Now: The Beginner Mindset Returns
(00:08:04) - Choosing Joy Over Fear in Technological Disruption
(00:15:03) - When AI Makes You Better at Your Job (Not Redundant)
(00:20:45) - The Embodied Engineer: Why Your Body Matters More Than Ever
(00:28:36) - Five-Day Fasting and the Clarity of Absence
(00:39:44) - Attention as the Bottleneck in an Age of Infinite Answers
(00:44:12) - Value-Based Pricing and the Freedom to Focus
(00:55:23) - Adaptability as Practice: Reflections on 2025
Key Moments
The Feeling of Being 12 Again (00:06:48) - “It’s just like the feeling I’m getting is like the feeling I had when I was 12, and I got my Sinclair Spectrum and, wow, you can make pixels move on the TV by programming stuff.”
Experiments That Used to Take Weeks (00:05:44) - “Running some experiments that are kind of really cheap to run that would have taken a team a whole week to sort of try. You can do all of that now, just one person in a short space of time.”
The Shift From Code to Architecture (00:15:03) - “You’ve got to think at a higher level. And cognitively, the experience of ideation to actually implementing something and then going through some feedback loops... it elevates the experience of working with code and building things.”
Fasting as Creative Practice (00:37:44) - “I fast for three to five days, a couple of times a year... By day three, I’m writing more, I’m thinking more, I’m making progress on my projects. I’m making connections between things. And the answer to the question just presents itself.”
The Popcorn Moment (00:56:44) - “We are in such a mad, crazy time. It’s really like getting popcorn out and watching the world go mad... it doesn’t have to be daunting it can be really really exciting and solve problems that we have neglected up until now because they’re too expensive to solve.”
Sharing is caring!
If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider sharing it with two friends who might find it useful.
