Have you ever lived through a big transition?
A period when the old way of doing things quietly stepped aside for something new?
If you have, walk with me.
In my 22 years of life, I’ve already experienced what may be the biggest shift yet. I stumbled on a goldmine pretty early. And at a time when a lot of the present “gold diggers” didn’t even know it existed.
I spent years mastering this thing, only to wake up one day to an almost obsolete art.
Worst part? It felt like it all happened before I could put all of my potential to groundbreaking, world-changing use.
This one’s the story of a puritan — someone raised on traditional software engineering, who has seen the world go from that to “oh, AI can do all that now” (I refuse to give it a one-word label, for contempt I hold for anyone whose mouth that statement comes out from.. hehe)
If you’ve ever struggled to let go of something you once felt at home in, you probably understand. I guess in a way, you’re a puritan too.
Even back then, I refused to let frameworks be my default workflow because I needed to know how everything worked under the hood. Call it extreme if you want. I wouldn’t say I’ve changed much, though. I still believe in the originality of ideas born from human thought.
Six years on, we’ve moved, and fast, from memorising whole documentation of languages and tooling to vibe-coding. And today, as I write and refuse to give in completely to AI slop, I wonder if I’m slowly becoming the modern equivalent of a millennial who doesn’t understand why they should have to pay a subscription to listen to music, simply because they grew up in the era of vinyls, then dvd players. Or like those who had to adopt Web 2.0 after building their entire existence on still pages.
Is this resistance wisdom? Or just nostalgia wearing a clever disguise?
I sometimes ask myself whether, in a decade or two, AI will become what frameworks are in the present moment; an abstraction from programming languages but never their replacement.
Only time will tell.
For now, I’m leaving this here as the start of a quiet movement and a subtle pat on the shoulder to anyone(in tech or other industry) out there who has lived through a shift like this; to the ones who mastered a craft just as the rules were rewritten.
For now, we adapt, so the world doesn’t leave us behind with the remnants of an almost forgotten era.
Just thinking out loud…
