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The useful part

It's a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they've built over the weekend. Sometimes it's a surprisingly polished application that solves a real business problem.

How it works

• Then I think about what I mean and how to explain it to a non-technical person without sounding super patronising.
• We've spent so many years banging on about how to write good software that everyone has assumed writing software is the same as software engineering.
• I don't want to diminish that because I think one of the most exciting things AI has done is dramatically increase the number of people who can turn ideas into working software.
• "If AI can do this now, why aren't our engineering teams delivering ten times faster?" It's a perfectly reasonable question, after all we've all seen the demos.
• The first thing that would come to my head is "you don't know what it takes to build enterprise grade software".

What to take from it

It likely solves a real problem or demonstrates an idea. The first apps and "hello worlds" I ever built excited me enough to choose this as an actual career so the excitement is real and I don't want to temper it too much.

Example or evidence

• The application someone builds over the weekend is real software.

Details worth keeping

The conversation usually starts the same way. Twelve months ago they probably couldn't have built it at all. Your first hello world, which these days c...