#263 - Ex-Gojek CTO: Why the Age of AI Rewards Builders as Judgment Becomes Expensive - Ajey Gore

[00:02:03] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello. Welcome to another new episode of the in-person podcast recording of Tech Lead Journal. Today, I’m very excited to meet you, Ajey. So if you remember, five years plus ago, we did an online recording, I think episode 23. Very excited to have this chance to actually talk to you in person. Welcome.

Ajey Gore: Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. That was like COVID, I think so, if I remember. And we were locked in our rooms and we were like kind of recording and trying to do things. This is much, much better. I was like– And it has been always excited, exciting to actually revisit what we have done in last five years and see the perspective change. And I think COVID changed many things. One of the things, if AI has accelerated the coding, COVID has accelerated the digitization.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And also perspectives of life, I guess.

Ajey Gore: Yes, yes, yes. And COVID also created some false hope, saying, people who work remote, can work remote all the time. And then after some time people realize, no, that’s not true. We need people in person. So we are social animals. We need interactions, we need ideas to go through and all this stuff. So I think, there are also lessons in terms of what you can digitize and what you cannot digitize. But that evolution would have happened over many, many years, but COVID just forced that acceleration so fast.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And yeah, hence we have this in-person podcast recording. So I think that’s one part that I feel digitization does not give you the same kind of like interactions, the richness.

Ajey Gore: Yep. Yeah, it always is like very different in person. Also what happens is, I’ll tell you this. When you were– when I was meeting so many people on Zoom, so you only see still this. So you don’t know what the person really looks like. And then sometimes what happens, you have like, you assume the person must be very tall, and they’re not that tall. And then sometimes this, and this, sometimes you assume that person won’t be that tall, but they’re very tall or whatever way. So you get always surprised, “Oh, I did not think like that.” Has that happened to you at all?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Ajey Gore: Okay, cool. So it’s n- I’m not the only one who does that.

[00:04:10] What Has Life Been Like Since Leaving Peak XV?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think I’ve seen, you know, your posts, your blogs, and all that. There’s a little bit of change in terms of life, right? I think maybe like three months plus ago you stopped your last role in Peak XV, you know? So tell us maybe what have you been up to, what’s being… Like, what’s keep you busy these day?

Ajey Gore: So, like I wrote in that blog post, like sometimes you run so much or you walk so much, you talk so much or you work so much. You assume, you accept that is a new normal, correct? And then you don’t know when to stop, what to do. You feel you don’t understand, oh, I have been running all the time. What it feels like to walk? What that slow pace means? What does slow thinking mean? What does being slow and having time mean, right? So- and there are multiple, there are multiple reasons I did that. For example, there were some things around family which I want to focus on. There are some things around myself which I want to focus on. And one of the thoughts which also came across is like we work a lot. All of us earn money we work for many, many years, and we spend money. But we forget that we earn time as well with that money. And we end up spending time most probably at the end of when somebody calls retirement. I don’t believe in retirement. But yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll chill at sixty-five. Yeah, but that is something like we are doing it when you have money and time, but you don’t have health. So I wanted to bring that perspective, and I’m fortunate that I can do that. It’s very difficult to do, I can tell you that. It’s very difficult to do. There are some external forces, there are some internal forces. But sometime it just feels like, let’s do, let’s pause. Let’s do some tinkering. Let’s do something else. Let’s play those things which you have been willing and wishing to play for many, many, many days, right?

So that’s what I’m doing now. I am going after my passion. I have– I am building things. And then I had, I feel very much associated with the youth mental health and other issues. So I’m volunteering with the helloally or Ally. Ally is a Indian not-for-profit which is building mental health solutions to train therapists, teachers, and related people to identify and help youth, right? And that is very good for us. And everybody should actually do something like that. So I’m doing that. I’m doing that volun- that is my volunteer work. And then I’m helping few organizations. Like for– I just accepted being advisor to NUS Enterprise, because I was excited by their mission of doing things around data and AI. So I’m doing that. And then on the other hand, we are just going through this craze of bots and this and that. And I have been tinkering around that. We built ClawStation just for sake of it. It is okay. It’s side hustle. If it takes off, it takes off. If it doesn’t take off, I’ll go build, tinker something else. So yes. And reading book. And as you know that you– when you called me saying, “Ajey, can we do this?” And I go, “Yeah, I can do this. I have time. I’m spending time.” So I’m spending time with friends like you.

So yeah, that’s what is going on. It’s like pretty exciting journey in that sense. Because what is happening is that you have– you create slack in your life. And then slack allows you to think through. When you meet people without any agenda, then you have different flow of conversations. They go in many directions and then you come out mostly happy. “You know, I felt good meeting this person.” And then we talk about – because we don’t have any agenda, we don’t have any transaction scheduled, we don’t have anything to go after or before that – then the fluidity of conversation is very positive. So that is what is happening. And then a lot of people are reaching out to me, asking me for advice. They are in mid-career stuff. They are going through this AI stuff, and they’re like scared. Some of them are excited. So I’m telling them what we should not do, because I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you what not to do from my experience, which actually kind of reduces the possibility of going and doing something stupid.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think you brought a very interesting perspective, right? Because if I look at your career, you’ve been kind of like hustling or let’s call it hustling, like working hard, you know, from ThoughtWorks, you know, spent 10 years, GO-JEK maybe five years, Sequoia, Peak XV is about another five years.

Ajey Gore: Yeah.

[00:09:02] Why Should You Create Slack Instead of Always Running Full Speed?

Henry Suryawirawan: So you’ve been like, kind of like running in full mode all these years. And I think when you mention about earning time, spending time, I think it’s in everyone’s interest now to actually understand what does the concept mean. So maybe if you can elaborate for people, especially mid-career and, you know, later stage of career people. Actually sometimes we don’t realize that actually we miss this opportunity to create slack time, spend time on our passion and all that.

Ajey Gore: Yeah, so I wrote this on my blog, the Space Between Chapters. So I’m living in the space between the chapters. One chapter is over and next chapter is supposed to start at some point of time. And I found this space, or I’ve kind of created this space and I’m going to live through that space. Lot of time, what happens is people don’t believe that they can create that space. That is first thing. If you don’t believe that I can create that space, then you will not be able to do it. And I started that blog saying someti– the most courageous thing is to do stop running. It’s like just stop running. That’s the most courageous thing to do because there are a lot of things which we have preconceived notion. We worry about a lot of things which have– which are not yet come, and we ponder and regret about a lot of things which have gone in the past. It’s so difficult to implement that whatever happening in present, can you enjoy that, right?

And I’ll tell you, Henry, last three months, it’s like February, March, April is gone. We are sitting on the thirtieth April over here. And it’s so funny that three months or ninety days are gone, and I’m like, I am still like busy and meeting people, and I’m enjoying it. I don’t know where those three months are gone. So first thing is that I spent a lot of time with my friends and family. I took my kids to bouldering, which I never thought I would do, right? They climbed the thing and all the stuff which is amazing. And then I’m again going to spend a week with them just like that. And then what happens is the slack allows me to think, and that is very important. So I will try to give you the analogy of getting up late and getting early. So if you get up late in the morning, what happens is, suppose you have to go to office at, like, eight thirty, nine. And you get up at eight fifteen, then what are you doing? The first thing is you are reacting to the time. So you’re hurry, hurry, hurry, and then you’ve– somehow you get into MRT or car or whatever and get to your office by, like nine.

And then whole day is going on reactions to reactions to reactions to reactions, and end of day you come home, and then you actually just do default things. But now just flip this and say, I get up at five. Now I can think and deliberate on things and I can create a slack. Yes, I had to sleep early at ten, but that slack is way more important than actually working like a night owl till two o’clock and then getting out at eight fifteen and do… actually, and we don’t work. We actually spend time during work hours, but not useful spend time. I’m not saying that don’t go on social media. I’m not saying that don’t watch movies. I want to watch movies. But what I’m trying to say is create a slack in the system. And it is very true for creating the slack, not in your personal life, but within your teams as well, else innovation will not happen. Lot of engineering teams I see, they always react, right?

Now, second thing. Many people will say, “Ajey, you are saying it because you can create slack, and you have money, and you are financially secure.” I don’t think so it’s like that. There are many, many examples, and I have seen many people who don’t have a lot of money, but they have done this as well. I think I watched a TEDx talk. I don’t remember the talk, but I watched a TEDx talk. Somebody was in Thailand, in Bangkok, and he actually, I think the name was Danai, and he actually went back to his village. And now they– he has, runs a very big, large village where he like… creating a house is very simple. You just dig up the soil and build a mud wall, and you have a house, right? You don’t need to do that. But if you have to live in Bangkok, he has to spend so much money or Hong Kong. I don’t remember. The point is he– I watched that talk around ten years back and I was like, “This is amazing.” So a lot of time we have this preconceived notion of about our work and job security and all the stuff, and that’s where I go to my principle.

[00:13:47] Why Being Uncomfortable and Replaceable Makes You More Valuable

Ajey Gore: If– When I talked to you last time, I think I talked about it, being uncomfortable is one of the most important thing for anybody. If you be uncomfortable in your job then you will be able to take new challenges. Second, be replace– being replaceable is also one of the most important thing in our job. Because if you can be replaceable, then you can do something new and you can be uncomfortable. And if you be uncomfortable, you will acquire more skills. That will eventually lead you to take you out of one important fear. Will I get next job or will I have something to do or not? If you have done enough many things, then you will be able to do something, right? And that is very important. The way in continuous delivery, or continuous integration, the only way we can do that, like one-click deployment, is because we have test harness that we know our code will not fail, and it fails, we’ll know about it before it actually we can click the button. The button will not get enabled, right? That is a harness which allows, gives us confidence that our code will work. This is also the harness which will give us the confidence that we’ll get a job.

I can do this today because somewhere I have a little bit of confidence that I can get a job. Somewhere I have confidence that I’m useful for somebody, right? For various reasons, various experiences and all stuff. People do value experience. You must have heard this joke where there’s somebody was called for some electric or some computer error. And he came and, like I think took a hammer and str- s- like put it on some right place and the thing start working. And somebody asked like, “So how much should we pay you for?” He’s like, “A thousand dollars.” And like, “Why a thousand dollars?” Like, “No, put- striking with hammer is like $1. The rest is to know where to strike.” Right? My point is people should experience, people should gather those experience, and if they do, they gather that experience, they’ll become valuable. If they become valuable, then they’ll be useful. If they are useful, then they can create slack, and they can create a space between the chapters.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think the importance of creating slack, you know, sometimes we see it in the literature, right, productivity and creativity and all that. Definitely creating the slack is very important I feel. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be not having a job, right? You can create slack without – for example, like maybe go for running for a long time or, you know, you meditate or, you know, just do something that doesn’t really fully engage you in terms of, you know, work or career and all that. Sometimes that could let your mind wander and…

Ajey Gore: Oh, I’ll tell you this. One other hack I have is go for walks, runs, but without any digital stuff with you, not even with your phone. Now you are forced… But the, another problem is like a lot of time people want to record this on Strava. I don’t know why.

Henry Suryawirawan: I do. I do that.

Ajey Gore: I know. So my point is like, yeah, it’s okay. Let it go for one day and just go for a walk. Then you’ll suddenly realize there’s so much of world.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah

Ajey Gore: I go out for a walk without my phone, and I come back in like one hour or two hour, and it’s like amazing. Like I can stop at some hawker center on the way and eat some food, have some coffee, or I can do something else and come back. And you’re absolutely right. People can create slack in their life just like that. Very simple. See, I– when I was in Gojek, somebody asked me, “How did you scale Gojek?” I go, “Okay, the only way we could scale Gojek was discipline.” Discipline brings the scale, and actually scale also brings the discipline. If you want to scale, you can’t be indisciplined. And if you’re at scale, then you have to be disciplined. So my point is just be disciplined. Say I will do this once a week and that’s okay to be disconnected for once a week. If you can’t disconnect for once a week for two hours, then there is a problem. But I agree with you.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Like for me, I’ve been doing a lot of running as well lately, like maybe three times a week, like an hour, more than that sometimes. I think it gives a lot of benefit, especially sometimes it’s just creativity flowing.

Ajey Gore: Yeah. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Because the interconnectedness with things that you read, maybe things that you didn’t think about, somehow it blends during the session.

Ajey Gore: Yeah. And you think about many things, which you wouldn’t think about if you are engaged with your devices.

[00:18:12] Why Earning Time Matters as Much as Earning Money

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So one thing that you mentioned about earning time, spending time, I think that’s also very important, right? Because we all feel that we have to work hard during young. This is probably also true for Asian, right? Our teaching is that, yeah, when you’re young, work hard, earn a lot, save it, and then when you retire, you kinda like spend that. I think this is like a mis- big misconception in life.

Ajey Gore: True for Asians, Indians, and everybody else as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: I have a saying, saying we live poor, die rich.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: So you are right. So there is a… I got inspired by this guy called, again, I forget his name all the time. He was Sembcorp in Brazil. He wrote the book Maverick. Why I forget his name every time? I, and so he has a very amazing TikTok. But anyway. So he says something like this, “Think about…” and I think I asked you this question, and I actually wrote about it. I wrote a small utility on my blog called life.html. If you go to my blog at ajeygore.in/life.html, it’ll ask you a few questions, and it’ll show you how much life is left.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, okay.

Ajey Gore: I really wanted to create a gadget around it, like a digital panel which like beeps today’s year and tells you how much is left, right?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: That, we, I talk about lot of people that they live as if they never, they will never die. But then they die as if they never lived, right? And this philosophical, but it has been there with me for like almost like 10, 10-12 years. So there is guy called Ricardo Semler. Ricardo Semler has a very good TED Talk. He talks about many, many, many, things, but one of the things he talks about is think about this, Ricardo, one day your doctor tells you that here is your scan. You have one year to live or six months to live. What will you do in that six months or one year? I think your perspective changes. And it changes very dramatically or drastically. Up to you how you want to think through it, but dramatically or drastically changes, right? And then you will do many, many, many things which you had in your bucket list or non-bucket list or unbucket list, whatever. You unbucket many things. You had the bucket list and you unbucket that. So what he said, he’s like, “Oh, instead of waiting for that moment, I brought my terminal days forward. So every Wednesday I go out with my wife. Every Sunday night or every Friday I go out an afternoon for movie.” I have actually done that once. We went out for a movie in afternoon, Monday afternoon. It was amazing.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: There was no rush. Everybody’s chill. The hall for ourself, we enjoyed. We had a food. No, there’s no rush over there. And good restaurants like try to do that on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Why? Correct? So that is where the slack comes in, right? And it’s very fulfilling. So lot of us also, and I tell, I usually tell this to my Gojek colleagues, I say, “Take leave, take off, go somewhere, do something.” But spend your leaves. Like, don’t let it… Like there’s no pride in carrying forward your leave. “Oh, I have like 45 leaves.” Like what will you do with those? Correct? People don’t take leave. They want to work. And I’m saying I don’t see things as a work-life balance. I don’t see thing as oh, 0% , 0% or 100%. No, it’s not like that. It’s a blend. It is somewhere in the shade of gray, right? It’s not like I work eight hours and I switch off. No, you can’t do that. If you have to work 16 hours, you work 16 hours. We worked like three days night outs. I have done that. Do it.

But then slack hard as well, yeah? And if you do that, if you practice that, then nobody’s gonna question you. Then, “Hey, why you are not coming on Friday?” Or, “Why you are not coming on Monday?” Because they know that if there is something on Friday night or Saturday night and with that require Henry’s, or Ajey’s attention, they will be there. So we have to build that trust, and then we can slack during the work as well. But having this kind of slack, what I’m doing right now with advising companies, doing small things, I’m… Just say, I’m having small meals, let’s put it that. I’m having small bites the, during the whole day, right? But I’m still doing this. I’m still working. It’s not like I’m not working. I’m still working with NUS, I’m working with a few companies, I’m doing this. But not in a traditional way. I have sprints, so I run 100 meters, then I take a rest of one hour.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. What I learned as well from some people, yeah, the concept of work-life balance sometimes is not appropriate, right? It’s more like seasonal thing, right, where sometimes you can work hard. But just don’t forget that you also have to go through, like, the winter season. Maybe take a break, you know, chill a little bit, not like running 100% all the time, which probably is…

Ajey Gore: I have done that during my Gojek days, and I was very proud of that. And then I realized I was like, “Shit.” I wrote about that as well. I talked of blockers of pit stop. Like if you don’t take a pit stop in your car and you just go around, the tires will bust. So yeah. They go fast, but they take a pit stop as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And I like the, like you brought the importance about life, right? So I also follow stoicism and all that. They also have the same concept, like memento mori, you love, for the love of death. So, you know, the illustration of number of days left and you just cross it every day.

I think it gives you perspective that actually, yeah, life is kind of like limited, right? So if you don’t realize how much left, you wouldn’t be able to spend the time.

Ajey Gore: And also it happens like you ask this, what for? And most probably so, so people who have extremely successful or extremely not successful, they reach a peak and either they go down in the valley or they keep climbing, right? But at one point of time, their time, if you ask them this question, and we don’t know when. So a lot of people who are hearing this right now may say no to answer, because that question, the answer to that question comes when there is a realization. And that realization can happen at eighty years old or eighteen years old. So it may not come to many, many people and said, “No, it was, it is all worth it.” But at one point of time, when you ask the question, “Is it worth it?” Like, no. What worth is, what worth it is, is friends, family, kids.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, relationship

Ajey Gore: Relationships. That’s what is worth it. Yeah.

[00:24:57] Why Is This the Age of Builders, Not Typists?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So speaking about this, right? So you mentioned about, you know, you have to challenge yourself, be uncomfortable about stuff, and these days it’s all about AI. I mean, if can we switch topic from life perspective. So I think AI brings a lot of anxiety to people today, right? And also brings a lot of maybe existential crisis. You know, some, for example, developers, we think we are gonna have no job in the future, in the short, you know, time. So what’s your perspective with all this? Especially you have dealt with, you know, like software engineering, building engineering teams for quite a long time. So what does this AI era, you know, give you perspective?

Ajey Gore: Oh, there are three perspectives I have. I was talking about, I was reading and talking at people. So first perspective is engineering practices are getting reinforced. That is first perspective. People are talking about the spec-driven development and TDD and like– I also wrote a post about, it’s called “expensive thing”. Though my point is that people are trying to make sure that whatever is being developed is developed correct, right, and all the stuff, right? So that is first perspective. So I’m happy that people are reinforcing those software engineering principles which we lived and breathed. We both are from ThoughtWorks, and we have lived and breathed the whole Agile, TDD stuff, and we know the value. And we know that many, many people, when we go, we would go and tell them, “Please write tests.” They say, “No, tests will slow us down.” But that is coming now.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: Earlier, I think we did trust developers because they were humans. Now we don’t trust agents because they are not humans. But both developers and agents did the same thing. They both do the same mistakes. But earlier we did not verify, and we verified in very manual way. But now the amount of code AI is producing, you can’t do that. So that is first thing. The engineering principles are getting in place.

Second thing. This is exactly like a cognitive industrial revolution at par with the industrial revolution which happened hundred fifty, two hundred years ago. Like think about it, when, steam engines replaced horse carts. Think about it when handlooms got replaced with the mechanical or industrial looms. What happened then? What did those people do? One of the interesting thing those people did, industrial revolution did not bring unemployment. It actually bring more employment. That means on the sidelines, there are different jobs now. Instead of putting the horse cart, you are actually– you have to learn to become engine driver. And then you need somebody at the end of the ca– train as well. And then you need a conductor, then you need many more things, and then you get more efficiency and all the stuff, right? Like think about then when people got airplanes, did ships and cruises stop? No, they did not. But they reduced. But then there’s a new industry got created, and people transformed and moved, and operators became better operator, all the stuff. So this is industrial revolution.

What I’m trying to say is that age of agents will reward us as builders. The problem is lot of developers think they are just developers. I have always debated that software engineering is a balance of art and science. That means software engineering is not industrial process. That means we all are creative. If programmers are not creative, they can’t program. Unless they’re very dumb programmers. But if you’re good– and, those guys will get out of job anyway. Like they will get let go anyway. So– And they have to do something about it, and that is completely different stuff. And this– what I’m saying is may backfire, but it’s okay. But we are creative people. Now if software engineers are creative people, that means this is age of builders. If it is age of builders, it’s a boon for us. We can build things at different speed, different thing.

So what it means, right? Now what it means is very simple. Think about– I’m trying to figure out a very bad analogy. I have a very bad analogy, but anyway, I’m gonna give you that bad analogy. Think about we have a dog, and we have a ball, and we throw the ball, and the dog goes and fetches, and we’re trying to eat something. But dog is so fast that it comes back immediately, so we are not able to try. And then we take it and throw it very far. And we try to eat one bite, and instantly it comes back. And then this time we’re gonna throw it really very far, right? Now the dog and the ball fetch, this whole thing is agent. Coding agent. So what happens now, we type something, do this, it does that. But we have not thought about it. Now we are reacting, okay, it’s free. Now I have to type something else. Now I’m typing something else. And that fetch and pull is happening, right?

Now what has to happen, there has to be a paradigm shift. See, in software industry, it is not a people problem. It is a management problem. Think about it. Earlier, our bottleneck was the people who execute. Software developers. And then the bottleneck was not the people who ideate or give the problem, like product managers, BAs, and all stuff. Now the thing have flipped. Now we have to create enough thought process. We have to flip it on the things and start thinking like, how can we create more specs? How can we create more, better PRDs? How can we define correct? Like one of the things which TDD works and the reason we had Gojek with like nine hundred plus microservices, thousands of deploys, and we had downtimes, but we did not have that much crazy downtimes. I mean, we could do root cause analysis and people could deploy ten times a day. There were like easily two thousand deploys or three thousand deploys a day, and we still could do that. We did not wait for weekends. Because we were defining, all the time all of us define what is correct.

See, tests define what is correct. What is that judgment which says what is acceptance criteria? When we define acceptance criteria, we define both things, right? What it means when it works perfectly fine, and what it means when it does not work perfectly fine. We write both, right? If I give a wrong username and wrong password, it should fail. We have to write that. While we write also that given a right username and right password, it should log me in, right? So that defining that correct means it also encompasses incorrect. Now given that, if you now think through my view, now we have to spend more time, more chunky job, so that agent go on for a long time. Correct? So instead of saying, “What did you do yesterday?” The standup questions change. “Henry, what did we deliver yesterday?” And what did you deliver yesterday means, what did you validate yesterday, right? So now the whole– there is a whole paradigm shift. Now you’re a product manager, but instead of having like one BA and four developers, you have four BAs and one developer, and maybe, 0.5 QA or maybe no QA. Because verification has to go up to the level. Then what would QA do, right? They also have their work, but their work is now changing to becoming more QA automation people.

So the whole paradigm shift is flipping. The builders getting more hand, more control, and executioners, which are like developers are getting less. So if you are gonna remain developer, eventually you will have to go up and get your better skill at creating a better judgment, experiences, and then you will be able to get more useful skills. What you pay for, what you are getting paid and what you pay for is always a skill. You’ll never pay for typing speed, do you? So now what has happened is typing speed and some of the structured skill is gone. But this is not only happening here. You don’t define correct over here. Now you have to define correct in domains as well. Financial domain, you have to define correct. If you don’t define correct, then you’ll have wrong financial audits, right? Lawyers, you have to define correct. We know that whole hallucination and whole legal issues and LLMs generated have fake cases and all stuff because they’re just token generators at the end of day, right? So the more structured jobs will increase the circle of skills, and you have to learn peripheral skills. And then you can– and you should be a builder. All of us are a builder. So it gives a fantastic chance for us to actually look forward for doing that- instead of trying to resist AI and trying to resist agents and like, oh, we’ll still– Yeah, you can create artisanal code.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: Yeah. Like I was telling somebody, I was telling my, one of my ex-colleagues saying, “Remember ten years back, we actually wrote every bit of that line?” Actually, I’m telling you. Yes.

Henry Suryawirawan: Same.

Ajey Gore: Yeah, we wrote every bit of that line. Can’t believe it. And now, I’m actually happy, and people should be happy about it. They should embrace this. Yeah. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I still remember writing getter, setter. That’s like the boring-

Ajey Gore: Every time, yeah. Control+Space, Control- everytime, it’s so boring. It’s so, so, so boring. So yeah. So I was saying, so when expertise is becoming almost free, whether it is design, and it’s happening every day, whether design, security, audit, everywhere, then what becomes expensive? And my answer is judgment becomes expensive. So we need to fundamentally start focusing on judgment layer. And judgment layer is gonna be very important for everybody, like how agents are doing. Because if agents can do good things fast, they’ll do bad things fast as well. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yes, exactly. We all see it in the cybersecurity space, right? You have hackers and you have defenders.

Ajey Gore: Yeah. And, like we had like a few days back, I read this document where a coding agent went and destroyed the entire AWS cloud environment, and said, “Oh, sorry, I don’t have backups. I should have checked before doing this.” Like, yeah, but now actually you don’t have anybody to scream at as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: But one thing that doesn’t help is actually all these big AI companies are saying, you know, it’s like fearmongering in a sense, right? Maybe in the interest of increasing their valuation, whatever that is. They’re saying like, “Okay, software developers, we don’t need anymore. Now going to legal, accountant, and all that.” So there’s this perspective that, yeah, maybe I need to really switch my skill.

Ajey Gore: No, no, no, no. Look, 88% of AI companies are actually adopt– or companies are adopting AI. Adoption has increased. But only 6% have successful projects. So why? Because look, it is– Okay, I’ll tell you this. I’ll let me put– give you this example. I gave this example about Linux many, many, many years ago. I’ll give the same example about AI now. So when you get into Unix shell, right? And it is powerful, and what you get is a blank screen and one prompt. And then you are trying to install one package, and you don’t know how to do it. And then you struggle. Like, AI is like that. You are given a very beautiful, amazing car. Take any ex– any luxury brand, and you’re given the key. You started the car, and it started because you touched it. Starting a car and running it on a big field is very different than starting a car and running in a controlled chaos road. So a lot of people, what they’re experiencing right now is they got this car, and they got this big field, and they’re running like anything, and it’s all good. But when they get out of that field, and they exit the field and main– come to main road, now you have to put a lot of guardrails. Who is gonna put those guardrails? Only people who know how to put guardrails will put the guardrails.

So our job is changing from… So earlier what used to happen, we do cognitive job, right? All of us, like lawyers and financial, everybody does cognitive job. We sit and do. We type, and the machine does something, right? We don’t do heavy lifting job. So all that cognitive job was about to build guardrails, always correcting, always fixing. And that was, as a software developer, that part in our life was very, very small part. In the beginning, like morning, you read your story, you read your card, et cetera, you start typing. Now the whole day you’re just typing, typing, typing, typing, typing, and following that thing. But now our job is the typing, if typing is gonna, if– Think about this. If typing is done by somebody else, then what will you do? Then you’ll think more. My point is, it is telling us to think more. It is allowing us to getting free from that typist job to more creative tinkerer job. So I don’t think so that is gonna go away. Yes, job will reduce because typing capacity is going away.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: So if you’re doing that, then you are going away. Like for example, if you are just a front-end developer, yeah, like two years old, three years experience front-end developer, yeah. Because that basic stuff finesse has come. But if you want to create a UX, yeah, Claude Design can do many things. But if you really want to create products and do something, experiences, we are the one who can create. Machines will imitate, but they’ll imitate so nicely, it almost feels like creation. Correct? But if you go little bit further on that edge and treat yourself as a builder, then you will suddenly figure out, oh my God, I have so many opportunities.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah

Ajey Gore: And people are not thinking like that. People are trying to use AI at a very minimal level. They’re not trying to offload their job and think more. I think I want to encourage people to offload their more job to AI so that they can do something better. But if you always have been that guy who goes and reboots the server, yes, your job is gone. I’m sorry to say.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think what you brought up a very good point, right? So obviously we need to level up ourselves, right? In the value creation, right? No more typing as like a skill or pressing that button, but more like the builder, the creative thinker, you know? Putting the judgment, I think this is also something that is very important, right? Putting the guardrails. Define correctness, incorrectness, and you know, the judgment on what is good. Maybe some people also call it taste, right? Because only humans, I hope, only humans that can give the taste, you know, opinion, right, rather than the machine.

[00:40:55] What Should You Not Do While Navigating the AI Revolution?

Henry Suryawirawan: So earlier you mentioned it, it’s very hard for anyone to predict now what’s gonna happen with this AI, but one thing for sure, you know what people should not do. So maybe tell us what we should not do in order to navigate this time better.

Ajey Gore: We should not resist.

Henry Suryawirawan: Okay.

Ajey Gore: First thing is that, accept, yeah. I, somebody asked me and we were debating on the framework and all the stuff. And I tweeted about it, like two, three days back as saying: “Hey, are you here to ship the framework or are you here to ship the product?” Correct? That’s very common, right? So we should– And when I ask people, a lot of them ask the people, like, are you– and my, one of my friends also asks these people, “What is your job?” If I ask you, you are in company, what is your job? They’ll say, “My job is this and that.” And I know that, and I ask again, “What is your job? Think more.” And few people reach a place where say, my job is to have value creation for the company. Whatever role you play, the problem is people mistake their role for a job. If our job is to create value for a company, because our– we are giving our time to them, and that’s why they will pay. If we stop value creating, then they’ll not pay us. Very simple.

So there are multiple ways to create value. So that’s where I think, first, accept it. Second, figure out multiple ways of value creation. We all are very good cognitive thinkers. We are very few– We are one of very few people in the world who are getting exposed to this and getting disrupted by this. People who are in, like, selling hawker center things, they’re not. They’re happy. People who are delivering food, they’re happy. They’ll get, at some point of time, and bots and drones will replace the food delivery or some other delivery. But still there will be more things. So my point is, this is a cognitive industrial revolution where this happens. So first, accept change. Second, think about your value creation.

And third, what not to do is very important, is get worried about it. There’s no reason to get worried about it. Because unless you stop worrying about it, you can’t think about something more, right? Maybe I’ll not get a job, and it’s okay. Can I bake a bread? Maybe yes. But I have this responsibility, I have that responsibility, I have that responsibility. Fair. If you don’t do anything, those things are still constant in your life. As you said, if you are think about a stressor, those things don’t change. If worrying about things can change things, then I would worry whole day. And I’m culprit of that. I worry about my son, my daughter, not daughter, my son, my wife, my relatives, my friends. I worry about them, right? But that worry gets away. But worried about them or thinking about them, like somebody falls sick, we worry about them, but we pray, right? Not that religious pray, but a spiritual pray. So my point is there is no reason to worry about it. There is– If you stop worrying, then you can think about path forward, right?

A fourth thing which, which I think is very important is that stop running. Close your eyes. Stop looking at your device. Stop getting consumed by stupid internet. Give yourself time. And then think how world, how beautiful world is around you. And then you will think about what can you do. That concept many of people will not agree with me. They’ll give me excuses, they’ll give me reasons, real reasons saying, “Hey, you are talking about that, but I have to pay bills, I have to do this, I have to do that, and I just got laid off.” There is no way you can get back to the same company. And it’s unfortunate. But now you got a time, you got a forced time. And if you stop worrying and stop immed– A lot of people just start immediately applying for a job somewhere else. That used to happen earlier. But the problem is you got laid off because there is some skill which got automated. If it’s got automated at company A, it will get automated at company B as well, and company C as well, and company D as well. So you’re not gonna– You can apply for five places, and if you are not a value creator for them, they’re not gonna hire a typist again. This is a very crude way of saying it. I’m so sorry to say this. So my point is, people should actually learn.

Actually, you know what, Henry, I’ll tell you this. Don’t you think our job has been always be– Like, we, our industry also has been always been about learning. Like when you started, maybe you are working in Java or C++. Now you work at Python, Rust, Go. You learn on the way. I think people forgot that we, our learning, learning exposure or learning attack area or exposed surface area has to be much larger now. So, like for example, I’ll give you one more example. Fifteen, twenty years back, you could go to a GP and not go to specialist. But today, if you got a tooth problem, you’ll go to dentist, but you’ll go to the best dentist who has done master’s and post graduate, everything, right? If you had to go to, like kidney or whatever, you’ll go to MD and whatnot and bunch of things, right? We seek. I think that also, I was telling somebody, that also has come to software engineering. Now you could just can’t have comp science degree. You had a comp science degree, then you had to do MS, then you had to do something more, and because this value creation has just gone really high.

Yes, it has gone very high in like very short amount of time and people are reacting to it, but I think eventually it will be fine. There are different kind of jobs will get created. For example, people actually are not good at prompt engineering at all. That is a new job got created. And people are not good at that at all. People should be good at that. There is– They should– Actually, there are papers about prompt engineering. I was reading a paper from Google. They are saying, if you repeat the prompt, LLM does it better.

Henry Suryawirawan: Oh, really?

Ajey Gore: Yeah. Now, that is about learning, right? So people are not doing prompt engineering. A lot of people just use Claude Code and just use Claude Cowork and Codex and all stuff. But they’re not thinking through, how can I automate the whole stuff? I don’t know how many organizations actually have built and put agents on their GitHub repositories to auto-merge the PRs. First of all, PR shouldn’t be there. But that is different software engineering, talking about trunk-based development and all that stuff. But have they put in PRs? Like, how many of them? Whatever people talk about automation, you know, they’re talking about automation on their laptops.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: They’re not talking about automation at the central level. They’re not talking about saying, “Hey, we will not develop on our laptops anymore. We’ll just do a cloud-based workspaces and work over there.” How many people are doing? Because once everybody works on the same box, same machine, shared terminal, then you can have agent which just can look at everybody’s source code. And how many people have done that? That is a skill they should be doing. Like, remember, we went through this DevOps thing, right? The thought process was that we don’t need anybody else, and developers should be doing operator. What happened? Other companies which could not upskill their job, they created DevOps role, man.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yes. They’re, are still there.

Ajey Gore: I don’t like it. don’t like it. Because DevOps is a set of practices, it’s not a role. But now big companies are advertising it as a role, and there’s a DevOps role. I’m like, no, that just sounds so wrong. So that’s where it is, right? So my point is, you have to now– Your full stack engineer, developer engineer definition has changed. Earlier, full stack was front-end, back-end, and whatever, and now it is like front-end, back-end, how to use tools, and how to write agents, and you have to do that. That’s it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think really good point, don’t resist. You know, do not get worried. Think about value creation rather than, you know, your tasks, your day-to-day job, right? And I think participate, right? You need to learn about all this AI stuff, you know. Otherwise, I think you’ll get replaced or you’ll get irrelevant in the world, in the industry, right?

[00:50:07] What Are the Top Engineering Practices Needed to Leverage the AI Revolution?

Henry Suryawirawan: So speaking about engineering practices, you mentioned it is getting reinforced, and I think for people who wants to leverage AI in the right way to always produce correct things, you really need these practices. Maybe if you can give your, I don’t know, like few top engineering practices that needs to be practiced really so that we can leverage and benefit a lot from this AI revolution.

Ajey Gore: Oh. So there is a book called Philosophy of Software Design.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, John Ousterhout, yeah.

Ajey Gore: I love that book. And there’s a paper, 1975, paper called No Silver Bullet.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Fred Brooks, yeah.

Ajey Gore: Yes, love these two things, right? And now then there is a– there are books around patterns and software engineering and enterprise architecture, all that stuff. But it kind of comes down to like three or four basic principles. For example, software is about composition. That means you have to be able to build software layer by layer, brick by brick. That means abstraction. So first one is abstraction. I always say, abstract everything out. Like when I– when people ask me, when people– when sometimes I ask people, what are you building? They’ll give me very big, and you know, very big, fancy thing. We are building this. And I say, no, no, what are you really building? And if you go down like two or three or five whys, basically five whys, if you go through that, finally they’ll figure out you are– they are actually building some CRM or some CMS or some SKU listing thing or some payment checkout stuff. You put them all together and this becomes fancy product, which is great, right? Software engineers should think like that. And we should now who are builders, they should think like that in terms of abstractions. Build thing– like build one thing which does only one thing, and then build one thing on top of it, like Linux commands. If you want to count the files on a directory, you say ls -l pipe to wc -l and you’re done. So one is that.

Second is about, define correct or like domain-driven development, behavior-driven development, test-driven development, whatever you want to call it, do that. That will give you confidence in the software produced, right? Third, now I never liked PRs, and I don’t like PRs still today. There’s no reason to do PR because now, now more so, because my agent will generate like three thousand lines in a day. Your agent will generate like four thousand lines in a day. And we both do a PR, and then they, we’ll pull our head and their agents will pull our head, and they’ll do absolutely wrong things to merge those PRs. It just becomes a race who checks in first. Henry checked in five thirty, I checked in five thir– Oh my God, I should have know– I should have known when he’s checking in, right? And this PR merge hell, companies are still going through that, but they don’t realize it. So now trunk-based development, do a branch, agreed, put autonomous code, merge the branch, but don’t do PRs. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s there to review. You are the one who is there to review. So trunk-based development, go move towards that. You do get commit a hash when you do a check-in, so you can actually pick your hash out and do something, right? Fourth thing, feature flags become very important. Super important now compared to any time. Like check in your feature with a feature flag. Check and disable or enable based on your environment. So feature flags.

So we talked about abstraction, we talked about spec, trunk-based, spec and also then trunk-based development, and then feature flags. Fifth thing, which is very important, is that try to run the whole damn test suite. Like bring CI. Lot of people use CI and CD as a buzzword. I want to again reiterate, CI and CD are two different things. But because of industry and lot of things, we say CI/CD. Because continuous integration is very different than continuous delivery. One validates your software and gives you a producible build. Many people have forgotten the concept of golden build. Bring that concept back. And then CD, continuous delivery, is about taking that golden build and deploying it on your server. CD does a last mile delivery, and CI does a first mile verification. So these are the four or five things. If people do that, I think that is good enough. And then there are many more things. But I live by these, and these are the easier one to actually crack.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think thanks for sharing all this for listeners who are curious how to actually excel in this, you know, AI era. Some of these practices actually has been around for years and decades.

Ajey Gore: Yes.

Henry Suryawirawan: But somehow we always tend to either forget, mispractice or whatever that is, right? So I think thanks for sharing that.

[00:55:09] How Did Ajey Build ClawStation Solo Using Story Cards and Agent Roles?

Henry Suryawirawan: I know that you’re also at the side, right, building this, you know, the claw thing by yourself, you know? Some people call it vibe coding, some people call it solo developer, whatever that is, right? How can you succeed actually building something? I assume it’s also not trivial, right? It’s not like to-do lists and something like that, right? It’s actually not trivial. It involves infrastructure and some kind of reliability thing if it doesn’t work, right? So how would you advise vibe coders out there? Do they actually need to practice all this as well by themselves?

Ajey Gore: At least first three. First three are the very important, which is I think abstraction, specs- and the trunk-based thing. I think that is very important, and I think that’s how I built it. And you have used it, and using it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: And that is little bit of complex piece of software because of, we dynamically prod– like procure infrastructure, then we set up a machine, then we put your OpenClaw there. We have baked image, then we take your parameters, we set with OpenClaw. There is a proxy, there is a dynamic DNS. So there are a lot of pieces, moving pieces. But the way I built it was very simple. I wrote about it, it’s called the Small Island of Delight, what OpenClaw is. And then there are– I wrote next thing, What Ten Walls All Developers Feel and Face. So basically the way I built it, it started very small. First one was to just automate OpenClaw installation on my machine- so I can give that a script to my friend, and he can, they can do it. But then once you have done that, then you have to make that machine, make the script execute using a web trigger. So you write a small web application. Then behind the scene, you write a small worker. But now that worker needs to know which machine, so you put a job in the queue, and it goes to make API call to cloud and get a VM for you. And that’s how I built it. But what I did, I spent a lot of time, like these story cards. I’ll always carry the bunch of story cards. And I wrote, literally I wrote, sat down and wrote the stories. And then I– And we know that we do this stacking of the story and fan them out, like what are dependents, what can are independent. I did all that stuff. To start with, I had like first, first day I had around like five cards. But next day they became like 12 or 15 cards. And then now we have like 300 cards. We went through that.

But then what I did, and I’ll tell you about that as well, I did a role play with the agents, but I used issues, GitHub issues as the anchor. So I’ll get a PM agent to read my description of card and then create a detailed card. Then I’ll get a tech lead agent to verify that card, and I will, I would use different Claude provider. And then I come back saying, “You got as a…” And then that I have shown you that the PM agent actually, the tech lead agent actually puts a comment on it. Then I get one more agent saying, “Hey, you are the implement developer. How would you implement?” Put the how as well. And then we implement the whole thing. And I have defined my agents.md, which talks about SDLC cycle, what they should do, what they should not do. Always, always deploy in the staging. Always. Never deploy in production. If you’re… I deploy to production. I never ask Claude to deploy production. I always click that button myself. So I had to click that button 15 times a day. So I set up a CI over there. So that’s how. Very small. But I did not write code. I did not write code. That is amazing actually. I’m very impressed with that.

[00:58:57] How Can Developers Successfully Let Go of Writing Code by Hand?

Henry Suryawirawan: So what makes it possible for someone who can let go writing code? You know, like, because I see these extremes, right? Some people even like in big companies like Anthropic, Spotify, they say no developers writing code anymore by hand, right? But some people still think it’s not possible. AI hallucinate. There will be incorrect code. What to do about it? Like maybe you can share your experience. How do you actually kind of like let go this, you know, having to deal with code?

Ajey Gore: First, I actually, that’s when I– honestly, that’s when I realized that judgment layer is very important. First 10 days in February were nuts. I was trying to make it work and because, like, the way… And of course, I improved. As I told you, first day five cards, 10 cards were there. But those 10 cards didn’t have anything to say how will I verify. What process I’m telling you right now after like, it’s like after, like, so many days and so many iterations going through like 300 cards, right? And then one day it struck to me, no, no, no, I’m not gonna do this way. I’m gonna do my way. I’m outsourcing typing. That’s how I did it. And I tested the system and all the stuff. So that check and balance, so people who are not ready to let it go, think about it. If you’re not typing, then what would you be doing? And that’s what I thought. And if I’m not typing, I’m… Well, that guy or that it thing or it or guy or girl, I don’t know what it should be called, but it sometimes is very amazing, huh? Like it talks to you. Oh, I’m sorry, I did not do this. It’s like so amazing sometimes. Like, oh, wait a minute, we should have done that. Like, okay, fine, whatever.

So put it in sandbox. First thing is that, put it in sandbox. Have your exact staging, production-like repli- environment. So I have two staging, two staging environments. I tear them down and bring them up. Do automation. Actually, one more point is very important, is do automation. Automation is very important. Do automation on all small things, so you don’t have to do. So in my software development lifecycle, only automation I don’t have is whichever I go and deploy. Apart from that, everything is automated, right? So given that, if you do a sandbox, if you abstract your small things out, if you define correctness, if you spend a lot of time on judgment layer, I think it does not hallucinate. Now, at least.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think the model has become so advanced now, and especially if you have a good harness tools, right, like Claude Code and all that. I believe, yes, hallucinations still happen, but if you build this correctness layer, right, your spec, your TDD, the things that can verify the behaviors accurately, I think, yeah, this thing tends to produce accurate…

Ajey Gore: And I am like very thankful to all my users of ClawStation. I not– I don’t have hundreds and thousands, but whatever I have, whenever they ask me something, I’m able to actually respond to them and finish fix their stuff, whatever it is. And it’s pretty interesting because I have exact replica of production running with me. So that’s where I am.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Hats off to you. Again, like I don’t know how you do it, one single person building. I think it’s quite complex to build something like a ClawStation. And yeah, I’ve been playing around with it, so thanks for creating that.

[01:02:29] Why Do 95% of Organizations Fail to See AI ROI?

Henry Suryawirawan: One thing also you mentioned, I mean, not just software developers, organizations are going through this moment as well, and they need to think how to implement, apply AI in their organization. One thing very interesting you mentioned earlier, right? So many people just think of automating, you know, maybe something on the local or maybe tasks that they need to do, right? But never thinking holistically in terms of maybe putting agents centrally and all that. And statistically, I’ve read also in, you know, some articles, maybe 95% of organization that apply AI doesn’t actually reap the benefits. Like there’s no ROI coming out of this. So tell us what’s wrong. Like…how come?

Ajey Gore: I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Around 2000, year 2000, a lot of organizations started moving towards electronic forms. And I’ll give a simple example. So electronic forms getting… I’m your customer, right? Earlier you had a physical form to get complaint. So what will a physical form will have? My name, I had to fill my name, my date of birth, where I think, and I put a complaint over there. Now, what happened in early days, those forms became digitized. But I’m your customer, so whoever designed that form forgot that they don’t have to ask me where I live every time. Because when I log in and set up my profile, that information already there with you. So if you look at earlier forms, a lot of information were again repeated again and again. And I’m like, “Why?” And this happens in a lot of forms still when you get bank forms and stuff. Those bank guys know my name. But why I have to fill it every time? Why I have to do DocuSign every time? Why can’t they do something? So that digitization took time. Like I’m s- like we are living in Singapore, and I actually see GovTech has done some fantastic job around that, right? Like whole Singpass, whole ICA and all. So it’s amazing, right? So given that, but that thought process came later. So earlier what was, “Oh, it is a physical form. Let’s capture this electronically as it is without re-rethinking the workflow.”

That’s exactly what is happening right now. We had– we have, now we have a smart, reasonable reasoning and thinking agents which can produce. But let’s not change anything else. So we have a trick or technique called value stream mapping, which you know. A lot of organizations are not doing that. They are not doing value stream mapping. They are not thinking, rethinking, saying, “If we keep AI in the center, then how would we behave?” And that’s where we start thinking about like how does– how do you behave smartly? What can you offload? What you shouldn’t offload? So people are not doing that. Till the time people will keep using AI as a, what to say, periph– I’ll give you a simple example. One more example. You have microwave at home.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: How many buttons you use on that?

Henry Suryawirawan: Maybe just one, two. Two, maybe max.

Ajey Gore: How many buttons it has?

Henry Suryawirawan: A lot. A lot more. I mean, like maybe 10 or 12.

Ajey Gore: And now they’re on internet. Like, oh, yeah, like you can start microwave using your phone. Yeah, but I have to go still put the thing inside the microwave, right? There’s a joke by one Indian, one Indian comedian, and I love that joke, right? And, same like this. Like if you can build, you can have all the features, but if you don’t keep people in mind, then you can keep building useless features. So sometimes it is about reducing what you already doing.

For example, the physical form always had the profile or user ID, name, address, and all stuff. You have to reduce that because you don’t need that. Same with AI. You have to reduce bunch of things. You don’t need those many. So now you have person one, he does something, then person two does something, he, she does something, and then person three does something, she does something. You actually have person one, two, three sitting over there and doing the same thing, but they are doing with the use of AI. But they’re still passing the buck from here to here. While actually person one can do this thing with three agents. Why we are not doing that? So that is where they’re not. They’re not understanding how to keep the AI in center and organize organizations, workflows around it. So one of the most important thing people have to think through, any organizations has– only thing they have is workflow, workflow, workflow across the things when they’re serving somebody. They just need to think that. And if they can do that, then things will become better.

For example, our early, like most popular software engineering workflow is this. Ajey works with Henry, Henry is Ajey’s tech lead, Ajey is Henry’s junior developer. Ajey creates a code, Henry gives a PR, Henry reviews the PR as if Henry has a compiler fit in his eyes. Never checks out, says, “Okay, it is good,” or puts a comment. And then, Henry merges the code and then it goes to CI. Now, if I am a agent, why you need to do that again? What you can do is you can tell me as Ajey, as agent saying, “Ajey, do this, but once you do this, and once you run this, make sure this, this, this happens.” Or tell somebody else. Two agents, they can run. You can have five agents running on your Mac. But we have not done that. We’re still creating branches with agents. Can you believe that? We’re still creating PRs with agents. Can you believe that? Why? If I am the verifier and if I am the executor, then why I’m doing this? So they have to– Like, they’re still using it as a minion rather than the builder. Like execution is gone. So let it go completely, you know. So that’s what is happening all over the place.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think definitely this requires like maybe, I don’t know, paradigm shift.

Ajey Gore: Yeah, yeah. Thinking differently.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Coming back to like value stream mapping and all that. I think the intention is not to automate what you are doing now, but also holistically thinking how can you let agents run by itself- natively, like, as if like- AI is the center.

[01:08:49] What Are the Real Dangers of AI-Driven Layoffs?

Henry Suryawirawan: For leaders out there, I think many are thinking AI means I can reduce a lot of people, layoff. Any thoughts about that? Because I’m sure, yeah, maybe in the beginning you can do a lot of efficiency and all that, but what are, what is the risk? What are the dangers of doing it this way?

Ajey Gore: I think if you apply our way of doing things in software engineering, you can always already reduce a lot of people.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: it’s not about people reduction, it’s about basic job going away. So automation can certainly reduce people, but they will have to certainly hire more people as well. Like how much ever people are doing hoopla about this, there are still people hiring. Why they are hiring if the people don’t need software developers? Like big companies are still hiring for different reasons, right? So before reducing the people, it is not like that AI is going to do five people’s job. It’s not. Again, that’s my thing. Management has to think through this. Like, it is flipping on its head. Yes, you don’t need one– five developers. You need only two maybe. But now you need, instead of having two BAs or two product managers or two product managers, you need four or five. Because now you can execute five things in parallel.

So what happens? Like, how are you gonna do that? What will happen is you will actually reduce your output, that this person is still not able to produce more things for this person. So organizations, yes, you can certainly reduce people on the very basic structure. See, the thing is very simple. What is getting replaced? The most structured things are getting replaced. Programming language are the most structured. So that’s why LLMs can reproduce them very much better. That is first most structured. Second most structured, maybe finance. Third most structured, maybe insurance. Then fourth, little bit subjectivity, comes the law. But still there is some– So anywhere the structure is– structured work is getting replaced. Cognitive work is not. The organizations should, if they are reducing it, it’s fine, but they are creating cognitive gap. They can’t live in that vacuum, so they need to think through that. They are not gonna go faster. They’re gonna go same speed. That’s all. If they are okay with that speed, yeah, let people go, it’s fine. But if you want to accelerate something, then instead of letting people go, think through and enable them with more skills. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think that’s a very good point, right? Instead of efficiency only, right? Think about how many innovations can you do if you upskill these people, let them build more, you know, innovate more. And I think, yeah, especially now with AI, many other companies, small teams can actually disrupt, you know, the incumbents.

Ajey Gore: Yeah. And tokens are expensive, man.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: People don’t understand tokens are expensive. People are burning a lot of tokens. They’re expensive and it’s not a pride. It’s not a pride. And sometimes you don’t have to have tokens burning machines. And it’s okay. So organization have to think a balanced approach.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And especially now we know that tokens are still subsidized because of a lot of investments.

Ajey Gore: Yes. And, oh, like people are still using– people want to use Opus 4.6 max effort for like writing a getter and setter. Why? So yeah, man.

[01:12:20] What Does the Future Hold for the Southeast Asian Tech Scene?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So what do you think the implications of AI also for Southeast Asian? Because we know the models all are coming mostly from Western. There are some open models from China. But for Southeast Asia, what do you think? The tech scene is gonna…

Ajey Gore: We have always been consumer, by the way. We have not been, in terms of software, we have always been consumer. Like not only AI models, like my watch, your watch. My phone, your phone. Everything around us is either Western or Chinese, right? Because those are the hubs, and we have been always a consumer. We are doing some good stuff over here. And that will change. But our– Like, if you look at Southeast Asia, the economy is mostly non-tech economy. It’s mostly financial and other things. So there will be some automation, but not a lot will happen. And the non-tech economy, the economy with more human dexterity will remain a little bit unchanged for now. If you have jobs which has human dexterity, your job is okay. You’re okay. You’re like, if you’re a physiotherapist, you’re fine.

Henry Suryawirawan: The robots coming.

Ajey Gore: Yeah, no. If you’re– Like, I’m not gonna put my head in like a robot barber. Like, they have, like, it’s like bloody, like scissors over there, man. What are you talking about? I’m not gonna put my head over there. No, no, no, no, no. One scissor goes wrong, like I cut your ear, I’m sorry, I’ll do it better. I’ll cut– Next time, I’ll cut both.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah.

Ajey Gore: No, I think our industries will get more modern. I think it’s good for us. I again, say, I see it as a boon for us. It is very good boon for a lot of entrepreneurs and builders. My view is that people who have been thinking about building, this is the best time to build software. It is best time to build automation. It’s the best time to put– Like, you want to do a drop shipping and you did not know how to build a website and payment system, it’s the best time. Just go ahead and do it. Like put fifteen drop shipping websites on the thing. Something will sell. It’s a good time, man. Like, I see it and, we are– since we are consumer economy, we will get benefit out of it, because the AI adoption and all this tech will make our experiences better. There will be many people who will actually work on building those experiences for us. And there will be better products.

So I think it is a good chance for us. It’s a good chance for all the people who have been thinking that West was or China or Japan or Australia or UK was the advantageous place and no level playing field. It’s a level playing field for us now. I’ll tell you fifteen, twenty years back when I used to go to US, people used to ask me: “Can you bring this? Can you bring that? Can you bring that?” Now nobody asks me that because everything is available. Same thing is gonna happen with the technology. Now we have very good chance and advantage to create things over here and give it to our consumers, and go to global scale as well. Like if you want to use software, you can use my software anywhere in the world. Yeah. Why not?

[01:15:29] What Must We Do to Avoid Losing Our Fundamental Thinking Skills to AI?

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So one thing that other, like some other people also think about using AI a lot more is that we’re actually not learning a lot. Because almost everything now you can ask and you get the answer. Like fundamentally, you know, in terms of learning, in terms of going through that hardship to actually, you know, understand principally what is going on, I think it’s getting reduced because it’s so easy to just do something, you know. We’re talking about creating stuff, let the agent do that. What do you think people should do in order not to lose this aspect?

Ajey Gore: They should not do that. Basically, I have found very few people who actually learned piano using YouTube. You still need an instructor. You still need a coach. So I have found if you are trying to do things and the more far-fetched away you are, at some point of time you will hit your limit, and that point of time you will be redundant. Especially in cognitive industries, especially in knowledge workers- not anybody else. So I think people should not. That’s what is happening. Actually, if you look what’s happening to software developers, because they stopped learning somewhere. They’re like, “Oh, let’s do this.” But they did not learn how to understand and learn about models and how to use the models, right? So that is what it is. Earlier we thought, “No, that is always gonna stay somewhere else, and AI will do this, models will do this.” They’re doing ETA predictions on Google Maps and all this stuff, but now same thing just came in and came in very fast. It’s a very fast change. Next era is gonna be about back to services industry. SaaS will get disrupted, but a small SaaS will get disrupted much faster. Large SaaS will also get disrupted, right? So it is excellent for services industry. If you want to remain relevant, you have to learn. You have to learn.

And I think basics, if you learn basics, then those basics can be applied anywhere. If you learn programming as a basic. So I tell people sometimes, you need to learn only four or five things in any programming language. How to define a variable, how to call a function, how to run a if condition, and how to run a loop. If you know this, you can learn any programming language very quickly. But a lot of people start with some other language, but they never learn the basics. They know how to do that. But then they would switch to a different language, and that language sounds very strange to them. But if you learn the basics, then you can switch languages. Same way, if you learn basics, and don’t forget about reading and being curious and being passionate. So I always say there are three things about us as individual which makes us very valuable. We have to be responsible. That’s our job to deliver something. We have to be passionate. That’s where we contribute to not only to our job, but our teams and everything else. And third, we have to be curious because that enables us to go to first two, right? So curious, passionate, and responsible. If you are, if you have to continuously go through this circle, then you’re fine. People actually, I think people who have been curious, passionate, and responsible, they aren’t affected. I think so.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I love that. Being responsible, being curious, being passionate. So definitely key learnings for all of you who listen. We have talked a lot. Is there anything else that you think…

Ajey Gore: No!

Henry Suryawirawan: … you have to… Okay..

Ajey Gore: Thank. You for hosting me. It was good conversation. I had no idea what we’re gonna talk about. But yeah, looking back, my perspective has changed a lot. And I wish a lot of people get better perspective in life and see what goes on. It’s still learning, man. I’m still learning. Yeah.

[01:19:25] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So I don’t know whether you still remember. Every episode I will ask these three technical leadership wisdom. So I know you have thrown a bunch of wisdom. So maybe if you can just give three version, you know, short version, what wisdom that you would want to leave the listeners today from this episode?

Ajey Gore: Aha! I think life perspective changes with the age, right? So when I was 25, I would say something different. When I was 35, I said something different, and now as 50, I’m saying something different, right? So first thing is that when somebody offers you some help, never say no, because their intent is always to help you and make you better. So that is what I have learned. That is one wisdom. I’m talking very different, that I would have talked something very different, now I’m talking very different things. So first one is that.

I think second, which is very important is like, in life, the more you age, the more you should and you will value friends and family. Because you have very few weeks with them. Like for example, if I’m gonna live till like 70 or 80, I have only 1,500 weeks. That’s all. Not much. The weekends. If you talk weekends, oh my God, only 1,500 weekends.

And third thing, what I would talk about, be curious, be responsible, be passionate. I think that is very important, because that will keep letting you go through the life. And then there are a lot of regular stuff, but yeah, I think those three things are one, one, one. Like if somebody offers you help, don’t say no. Just take help or ask for help. It’s okay. Value your friends, families more than anything else. And third, be curious, be passionate, and be responsible.

Henry Suryawirawan: Lovely. Thank you again for this conversation. Ajey, always excited whenever I talk to you because there’s so many wisdom that you always gave, right, through your stories, experience, and also examples that you also live by. So again, thank you so much, and I hope people learn a lot from this episode.

Ajey Gore: Yes. Thank you so much for hosting me again. It was amazing talking. It was great. Thank you so much.

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