I started seriously looking around, talking with friends in other industries, dabbling in a variety of side hustles. I had lost the joy anyway, how could I possibly reinvest in relearning my entire discipline? And was it even worth it, won’t AI just take my job in a few months or years anyways? Unfortunately, the more I poked around, the more I realized that a life of tech-based office work had made me pretty unprepared for much else that could pay the bills! And realizing that the other white collar work that I could consider were even more at risk from the promises of AI than my own world software engineering.
My boss at the time had given our engineering team both the freedom and challenge to explore AI, to try different models and tools, to spend money and experiment and see where it might fit. I started dabbling more, learning more. I was not sold on AI coding, the autocomplete copilot interface really bothered me (unless I was writing unit tests or inline documentation, two valuable disciplines I’ve always slacked on). But I did begin finding low-tech use cases that actually did prove increasingly useful.
Fix my grammar in this email. Help me improve this Jira ticket. Connect it to my gmail, calendar and slack and give me a daily plan of things that are important. Claude Projects was the first real unlock for me. Once I got individual output I generally liked, I would decompose into a reusable project. Spring of 2025, I had most of my engineering leadership workflows codifying into projects, which actually freed up a significant amount of time, to the tune of 10+ hours a week. I used this extra time to learn more about AI. Watching hours Andrej Karpathy explain LLMs from the ground up was empowering. I started realizing that the output of AI is completely dependent on the input - it’s not an encyclopedia or a search engine, it is a language generator that reflects and extends your own thinking and writing.
And then Claude Code was released. My dozens of Claude projects handling my tedium became simple Markdown file /commands living in an obsidian vault with my ever growing PKM focused on studying AI concepts and automating the managerial tasks of ticket creation, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and playbook generation. I was back to the early days of spending a majority of my day in maximized terminal windows with 5-8 sessions running concurrently.
My free time started going into writing software again. After completing my typical velocity of committed tickets, I started building things for Snowplow that I wanted to build. I built tools and apps in NextJS, Go, Rust. Frameworks and languages I had little or no experience in. This was the point where I was hooked. The spark was back. The truth is I had never fallen in love with code for code’s sake. As a kid I was enamoured by the idea that a computer was a tool I could use to bring my ideas to life, and code was simply the language I needed to learn to speak to convince the computer.
I have deep respect for those who will spend hours refactoring and refactoring something well after it works just to maintain code they are proud of, just like I have respect for calligraphers and poets, but that is not me and never has been. I’m a builder by nature. I have strong, opinionated ideas and a fundamental urge to see those come to life.
Every generation of computing has raised the floor on who can build and
what they can build. Assembly replaced wiring, high-level languages
replaced assembly, frameworks replaced boilerplate. Natural language is
the next layer, and for the first time, the interface matches how I
actually think and write.
I don't know if I can do it again.
What this new world of agentic coding and the power of LLMs has taught me is that I don't have to. I am not starting over this time. Twenty years of building things, breaking things, and learning how systems work, none of it was wasted. The language changed, but the thinking never was the code. It was always the architecture, the instinct for what to build and why.
The spark is back and I am building again. If any of this sounds familiar, stick around. I'll be posting my thoughts along the way.