I’m good at AI! At least that’s what my friends, family, and group chats seem to think. “So what do you think about all this?” is the question I keep getting asked lately. And for whatever reason it’s been making me do a little existential grappling about how I feel about my career as things accelerate.

To be very clear: I’m not afraid of being out of work. I’m afraid of what work now means. We’re hitting a real inflection point in this industry and I don’t really have a choice but to embrace it. As I’m writing this, a huge part of my workflow is Agentic, and I predict soon all of my code will be written by AI. I'm getting more done than I ever have before (I'm probably one of the highest OpenAI Codex users in my org 🫣).

But if I’m being candid, I’m not even sure I'm enchanted with what I do anymore. Now I realize that this is a ridiculous problem to have. The average person doesn’t even like their job. But follow me

A lot of people get into engineering for the bread. And that’s fair. But money alone doesn’t keep people here. There’s no gatekeeper to this profession. In theory anyone could learn to do what we do. Most people just don’t enjoy sitting with problems they don’t understand.

The job rewards a certain kind of mindset. The people who instinctively say things like:

“OK let me experiment.” “OK let me break this.” “Let me rethink the architecture.”

No bueno? Try again.

The dopamine hit of sitting with a problem for hours and finally cracking it was just mmph 😮‍💨🤌🏾

I love the game! I love the hustle!

THAT moment of discovery was the payoff.

AI changes that dynamic. The work shifts from discovery to orchestration. Break the idea into prompts -> Generate the code -> Verify the output -> Correct mistakes.

Repeat.

From a productivity standpoint that should be amazing. But psychologically it's doing something (damaging?) to me. 1st world problem irony, I don't know.

AI should reward people like me. People who can break problems down, guide systems, and evaluate solutions should theoretically thrive in this moment. I'd consider myself the ideal candidate for the era we're moving into...

So why does part of it still feel strange?

I keep coming back to something that used to be true about software. The biggest barrier was never ideas. It was execution. Lots of people had ideas for products. Lots of people had creative instincts. But actually turning those ideas into working systems required skills that were rare.

If you could build things, you had leverage.

AI is starting to chip away at that. The cost of turning an idea into something functional keeps dropping. Someone with strong instincts and a clear vision can now get surprisingly far without writing every line themselves.

Engineering isn't disappearing. But the center of gravity is shifting.

Execution gets cheaper. Direction gets more valuable. The question slowly becomes less "who can build this?" and more "who actually knows what should exist?"

And that leads to a slightly uncomfortable thought.

How much of the prestige of this profession came from the craft itself… and how much came from the fact that the craft was scarce?

I'm not saying the craft stops mattering. Anyone who has maintained production systems knows how messy software can get.

But the leverage is shifting. And when leverage shifts, the identity of the job shifts too.

I don't think engineers disappear. But I do think the role changes.

Maybe the people who thrive in the next era aren't the ones writing the most code. Maybe they're the ones who know what should be built, how systems behave, and when something that looks correct actually isn't.

Still, I keep coming back to the same question.

If building software keeps getting easier, what exactly does it mean to be a builder?