I’m sure you’ve seen this sentiment all over the internet. Twitter, facebooke, youtube… every scrolling addiction pointing to the same thing: The AI Overlords are here, and the world has been changed. As a software engineer (Most recently a reliability engineer) I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life chasing the job title of Software Engineer. Moving from Senior Technical Support to Product Ownership, back to Senior Technical Support, all the way to Software engineering. I remember when I wrote my first production code, and I also remember the first time I broke production code!

I didn’t take the traditional route, and instead started a family, then went to college. It was the best experience of my life. I got to grow intellectually, while at the same time growing as a human being. Becoming a father, and a husband was the hardest and most rewarding accomplishment, but I also had the ability (thanks to the amazing support system in my life A.K.A mrs.haxk) to continue my education, obtaining my masters. I wrote my thesis on reinforcement learning utilization for training FPS bots. It was such a rewarding experience, and I won’t ever take it for granted. But as of late, the world has become blurry. My future is no longer laid out, in an easy form, and instead appears to be disappearing from my fingertips. I had ideas of maybe one day buying a house, with a yard, and a garage. A place where my 4 kids could grow up, and live, and come back to once they ventured out into the real world. As far fetched as that sounds (as a millennial, my life has been nothing but wars, political anger, and constant economic turmoil) I still though that if I worked hard, and if I constantly learned and adapted.. at some point I would get there.

I can’t say I’ve made all the right decisions, or did all the current fads or jumped on all the bandwagons (man did I mess up the chance to win big with bitcoin!) but I never thought I’d be less than 40 years old, worrying about if there would be space or ability to continue to work in tech now that LLMs have become more prevalent. As some would like to say, it used to be that the separation between people who succeeded in software engineering, and those who didn’t, was primarily focused on how quickly you could output the correct algorithm, or burn the midnight oil to build the next big “copy of some current thing, but make it suck less”. I don’t think I ever bought that as the “moat” or separation between a basic engineer, and 10x engineer, or whatever buzz word fits the most. To me, it was the idea makers. The dreamers. The people who said “I want the world to look like this, so I’ll make it look like this”. I always wanted to be that, but I sort of got caught up.. in the things. The doing. The waking up, and clocking in. The enterprise systems, and startup fever. I forgot the purpose. I forgot what made this fun. What made this all exciting.

And then ChatGPT came. And then llama, and Gemini, and Claude (God I love Claude, they are actually fun to just chat with, and talk things over with). And suddenly, what I used to struggle with (what a lot of engineers used to struggle with, actually) became easy. It was more about how well you could communicate what you wanted, how it should look, and what it should do. Once it finished (and messed up a ton in the middle) you still felt that feeling.. you know the one. The one where you finally debug the auth function you wrote it pyotp, or the feeling you get when the last integration test finishes, and you get to cut a release. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change the feeling, it just feels… less. And as time goes on, and the more you vibe code your night away, the less and less it becomes.

But.. it’s still there. In fact, its now more spread out. Think about your friends. The ones who sat around you as you regaled about another long night in front of your screen, banging through some DSA problems, or building the next… twitter or whatever. In some people, you can see the want. The look in their eyes that tells you they wish they could make something as substantial. That they wanted so badly to will something into existence, with just a computer and a keyboard. LLMs, clawdbots, and the base44 crew give them this ability. And I think that’s beautiful. I think being able to share the thing I enjoy almost as much as my family with the rest of the world is exciting. Think of all the problems we may solve, or the things that could be made, and all of it was because people couldn’t find the time or the ability to figure it out. Now its just… there.. on the computer, phone, or tablet.

So now, code has become a commodity. There is no longer a moat. And soon.. most of the other things that would be a secondary moat will be automated as well.

I’m sure others will tell you “It just means system design will become more important” or “Its another layer of abstraction, one that tech has already been through before” and what not. Which is true.

But that doesn’t mean things haven’t changed. That the world of development is now smaller.. while being also immensely big.

I wish I had a plan. Some philosophical response I could provide, or “Just do this and everything will be good”.

But I can’t. I don’t have an answer. I also don’t want to feed into negativity, or doomsay everything, or tell everyone it’s all going to be fine. No one has any idea. Not the CEOS, or the 100x engineers, or the influencers on the internet telling you to buy a mac mini and let clawdbot run your life (while also leaking your credentials, and saying naughty things about you on an agentic AI social network).

What I can share is.. it’s never the right decision to be under-prepared, but it’s also never the right decision to always formulate the negative. I love engineering. I like making things with my brain and a keyboard. I like impossible problems. I like to plan and design and execute. I like the action of it, the feeling of it, and the way it makes me feel like I can actually contribute to the world.

Don’t forget the kid in you who thought they could change the world and make it better than it was before they left it.

Don’t forget this is fun, and also rewarding.

You can just do stuff.

Until next time,

Haxk