Spotlight Series: At The Intersection Of Code & Creativity
As AI changes how we work, our skills matter more than ever
When you hear the term AI, or read another headline about how it’s going to take over our jobs, how does it make you feel? Curious? Excited? Uneasy?
As I find myself using AI more and more in my daily work and life, I’ve been thinking about that question too – not just what AI can do, but what it means for how we work, the value we bring, and where we go from here.
I’m a seasoned software engineer who grew up coding in the 80s Sinclair era, spending hours typing out endless lines of code just to get the simplest of games to appear on the screen. But it was magic. I was hooked.
Computers have advanced. Frameworks have been built. All of them designed to speed up development, saving us countless hours in the process. But I’ve never seen anything like this.
As we begin this next chapter, with this technological shift that will touch every part of our lives, I enter it with wonder, awe, excitement, and yes, a little trepidation.
For me, it began with simple code suggestions, AI scanning a file and predicting what I was about to type.
That quickly evolved into agents capable of understanding and reasoning across entire codebases. Now, we have tools that can scaffold full sections of code, helping us prototype ideas in minutes that used to take hours or even days.
Naturally, this has led me to wonder what these tools mean for our roles, our work, and even the future of entire industries. It’s completely understandable to have questions, but I wanted to offer my own perspective.
AI, for all its capabilities, is not autonomous. It needs skilled humans, us. It needs people who can ask the right questions, shape the outcomes, and turn its output into meaningful content and solutions for ourselves and our clients.
Yes, AI can be fast, sometimes impressively so. But it still relies on the judgment, creativity, and critical thinking that we bring to the table. It’s our expertise that makes the difference between noise and value.
This isn’t about replacing what we do, it’s about changing how we work. Used well, AI can take care of the repetitive tasks and help us move through the complex parts faster, freeing us up to be more creative and find solutions we might never have considered.
It’s easy to focus on what these tools might take away. But we should be looking at what they help us unlock, how they can support our learning, improve our work, and make all of us more valuable in the process.
Author: Marc Hampson
The Spotlight Series is a collection of guest blogs written by WK360 staffers. The brief? To write about anything that interests them in their job; what they do, how they do it, and what gets them excited about the future. As a collective of passionate, creative and driven individuals who have a wide variety of skills and abilities, the Spotlight Series allows our valued team a chance to share their thoughts on our ever-changing industry.