I’ll admit, I spent a long time criticizing AI tooling, perhaps a bit disappointed with what the future looked like. I know many people who were ecstatic about all of this, all-in from day one. But it always felt different for me. Part of my love for programming came from designing and writing beautiful code. Or at least, striving to design and write beautiful code. Most of my career I was reaching for that “craftsman” status. I believ(ed) in that. Code is creative. Code is art.
Then came AI. In the beginning it was laughable, zero threat. But it was clear where we were headed. As it got better and better, it began trying to rip that “craftsman” mindset away from me. It’s hard to pinpoint what I was bitter about, though. Was it because it (seemingly) “leveled the playing field” so all of the decades of hard work I had put into building software no longer mattered? Maybe. I realize that’s a goofy way to think, but I take a lot of pride in my work, and pride is funny like that.
But—sometime last year I moved through the stages of grief and started accepting my fate. This was the way. So at the beginning of 2026 I really embraced what it could do for me. I tried to think “AI-first” with most things I had to do. Lots of experiments, running local models, lots of reading, learning, and adapting. I was a tinkerer again.
The result? It kinda paid off. I have workflows now that I couldn’t imagine doing manually anymore.
I think my fears and dread all stemmed from AI replacing things. If I no longer designed the solutions to solve my problems, then what am I? Just a “prompter”? Blah. But that turned out to be so far from the truth, at least for me. What I realized very quickly is that an AI-assisted workflow provided peak productivity gains and still left me with all the control I wanted. And a bonus on top of it all: the better the engineer, the better the AI output. Which means experience, knowledge, preferences… all still matter.
While I’m still unsure how happy I am about the future, it’s at least a lot less bleak. Engineering is still about best practices, tradeoffs, and adapting to the ever-changing shifts in technology. This particular shift just took a lot of intentional effort and acceptance before I could thrive in the new world. But I’m here now, embracing it, keeping my fingers crossed along the way.