Late nights. A stubborn movie app. Stack Overflow tabs I’d lost count of. I typed every line, deleted most of it, typed it again. When it finally worked I just kept playing with it; refreshing, clicking around, just staring at it. If you’ve been there, you know. That little app even got me hired. Today I’d have it running before I finished my coffee.
Honestly? It’s disorienting, sometimes even depressing. The replacement talk is loud, the fun feels different. The internet is still flooded with it. Someone built an app in an hour. Someone else shipped a product without writing a single line. Constant, loud, just a lot of noise. It felt less like progress and more like everyone was moving on without me, and I hadn’t even packed my bags yet. But somewhere in all that noise, something shifted.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” — William Faulkner1
Instead of pulling back, I leaned in. I kept asking why; why are they convinced this replaces us? I started to learn how these tools actually work under the hood, what they are and what they aren’t. Things like context, planning, knowing how to guide the tool rather than just prompting and hoping. Still learning, honestly. And somewhere in that process something clicked.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke2
It’s not magic. It never was. Look, I’m not claiming I understand how AI actually works at its core; that’s deep, that’s a whole career. But understanding how the tool works? How to work with it properly? That I can do. And once something clicks like that, you stop fearing it and start using it. Now I build things in hours that used to take me days. Not because I stopped being a developer, but because I finally understood what being one actually means.
So what replaced that feeling; the frustration, the late nights, typing every line and watching it slowly come to life? The joy of orchestration. Telling the tool what I’m thinking, exploring options I wouldn’t have thought of alone. Ideas flow faster. Tasks that used to drain me just get done. And I’m still learning; books, docs, new ideas the tool itself surfaces. The learning never stopped, it just shifted. And documentation; I used to have zero time for it, now it’s everything. Most of my time now? Markdown files. Lots and lots of markdown files. It was never about writing clean code. It was always about understanding how to write clean code. The tool does the typing. The understanding is still yours.
“A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.” — Saint Francis of Assisi3
But let me be honest. The tool can make you overconfident. I’d knocked out a few backend pull requests and started feeling like I had it figured out. Picked up a task, thought it was simple; just add an endpoint. The tool gave me something that looked right. It wasn’t. After reviewing it together with the backend dev, turns out it needed product involvement. The lesson? The tool doesn’t know what you don’t know. That’s still on you.
Does it make me feel dumber? Honestly, I’ve seen the memes, the studies, the “AI is rotting your brain” takes. I get why people think that. But I just don’t agree. You’re not thinking less. You’re thinking differently. And if you’re doing it right, you’re thinking bigger.
The attachment was real. So is what’s beyond it. Software development is changing faster than most of us are comfortable with. We resist what disrupts us; that’s just human. But somewhere between the late nights and the prompts that build in minutes what used to take days, I quietly made peace with it.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” — Kahlil Gibran4
I’m sure I’ll find something new to attach to, or maybe I already have.