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The skill that made you valuable is becoming table stakes. The new value is orchestration.
A senior engineer posted on Reddit recently about how it's almost like he's in grief. More than a decade of craft. The things he loved. And now it's all changing.
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It started with you ... and it'll keep going until you own it
AI is amplifying the technical debt you were already permitting. The slop in your codebase isn't a tool problem ... it's a permission problem.
The conversation you stop having
We stopped talking about DevOps. Now everything uses it. AI is slowly crossing that same threshold.
The vending machine problem
We treat AI like a vending machine. Prompt in, code out. When it fails, we prompt harder. That's nonsensical.
Why large PRs get rubber-stamped while small ones get torn apart
I built a dashboard to track PR review times. What I found broke my assumptions about code review culture. Large PRs were getting approved almost as fast as small ones ... and that says everything about where we're actually paying attention.
Accountability needs a 'why' AI can't give
Accountability means knowing why. When AI breaks something, there's no 'why' to interrogate. Until you define it.
The productivity advice that failed me for 15 years.
Every productivity system I tried assumed my brain could be disciplined into submission. They were all solving the wrong problem.
The assumptions you don't know you're making.
Every junior engineer thinks the job is syntax. Every senior engineer knows it's the conversation three weeks before the syntax. AI just made that clearer than ever.
The split won't be good vs bad devs
The strongest engineers walking through the door are not the ones with the cleanest GitHub. They're the ones who can describe, in detail, the agent loops they've built.
The tax I paid for 23 years is finally gone
The loudest voices in engineering keep framing AI as the great equalizer that will let mediocre developers ship junk code. They're missing what's actually happening.