I've been a software engineer for over 4 years now, and the changes AI has brought in that short time have been nothing short of wild to witness. The way I see it, a software engineer's role is shifting from writing code to reviewing it. And honestly, it feels strange. Like we're not really doing anything anymore. That's because most of us grew up with this labourer mindset: we write code, we're good at it, that's the job. That was the identity. Then tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others came along and most of us quietly had the same realisation: writing code isn't really something we need to do anymore. It reminded me of past transitions — typewriter operators, stenographers, entire professions that slowly became obsolete not because people failed, but because the tools got better. We went from pen and paper to keyboards and monitors. Now we're going from doing things to commanding AI to do them for us. Then tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and ...

Have you ever found yourself typing the same long command again and again in a project, and thought… "Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to type this every single time" ? That’s exactly where a Makefile can help you. What is a Makefile? A Makefile is just a plain text file where you define shortcuts for your commands. It tells the make command what to do when you type something like: make up Instead of writing the whole long command every time, you just run make with the shortcut you defined. A Simple Example Let’s say you’re working with Docker and the command to start your app looks like this: docker-compose -f docker-compose.development.yml up Typing this again and again is boring. Instead, create a file named Makefile in your project root and add this: up: docker-compose -f docker-compose.development.yml up Now, all you need to do is run: make up Boom! Much shorter, much cleaner. Adding More Commands You can add as many shortcuts as you want inside yo...