on powerusing ai at work

This work is still in drafts and is being updated!

This summer, I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to intern at SoFi under the Digital Identity - Identity Core team. It’s my first ‘big tech’ internship experience, and I’m constantly inspired and motivated by everyone I’ve worked with. The fast embrace of AI at SoFi was one of my biggest draws to the team—I’m always looking to increase my productivity and learning, and I think AI can be a great tool to do so. It’s been exciting to work with a team that shares new tools they’re using in their workflows, allowing everyone to learn from one another.

Now on my 10th week at SoFi, I think it’s time to reflect on my relationship with AI since I’ve been here.

Notable insights/lessons learned

1. Increasingly automated processes require increased training for 1) an engineer who can diagnose and resolve errors when critical incidents occur, and 2) an operator/manager who can correct the error and improve prevention measures. Automation brings about an unfortunate irony.The more automated a system becomes, the rarer it is for human involvement to be required. Presumably, the incident in which a human is required is also more critical. I forsee one of the biggest challenges at tech companies in the next few years will be to find the balance between humans/automation when preserving quality.
2. Minimizing the drawbacks of constant context-switching I’ve run probably 8 terminals at once before, and in a typical day I’ll have 3-4 running at the same time. It’s incredibly draining. For a while, I was confused why I was tired after a few hours of simply prompting AI terminals, but and I felt like my brain was deteorating. Context switching for humans causes declined performance on single-focus tasks, decreases accuracy, and, crucially, most of us underestimate how much multitasking affects us. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of the evolving job so I’m working on mitigating the damage with a centralized dashboard, automated notifications, and maintaining living documentations for each of my AI agents in parallel.

Bonus: My favorite AI features/tools I’ve discovered this summer!

1. bypass permissions. Most game-changing feature I’ve discovered here. Freed me from clicking “Yes, automatically allow all ___ commands” repeatedly in auto mode.
2. Open source skills/plugins. It’s been pretty fun playing around with my setup—lately I’ve been enjoying OpenClaw, ccstatusline, and ADHD. SoFi also has a marketplace of (impressively) helpful internal tools for things testing/knowledge management/code review.