Lately, I’ve noticed something about the way coders speak. Not the polished conversations you hear at conferences and definitely not the LinkedIn version of reality with its “AI is the future” slogans and stock photos of smiling people high-fiving a laptop.
I mean the quieter corners, the half-jokes in Slack, the DMs and the Telegram groups. The little pauses mid-sentence when someone realises what they’re implying.
A year ago, AI was a party trick. Then it became a shortcut. But now it’s part of the expected workflow. It’s becoming a new normal. It writes, reviews and explains code.
People use it to draft important documentation. It creates and even analyzes tests.
Just within minutes, it spits out prototypes. Even if you personally try to avoid using it, your teammates do. Your company does. Your competitors almost certainly do.
We already think and behave differently. The way we work and think has already changed.
People talk about how AI has already transformed the world. Most of them are afraid. They’re afraid for their jobs. But are we indeed scared? Or is it something else? Fear may be just the easiest one to admit out loud.
The strongest feeling I keep running into isn’t “will I be employed”: it feels deeper than that and closer to loss.
We’re not scared, we’re grieving.
When “What You Do” Becomes Part of Your Identity
Fear is about outcomes: rent, layoffs, budgets. Fear is the question: “will I still be employed in six months”.
That’s the reality. But lately it doesn’t seem to be the main feeling I hear from developers.
Instead, the mood is grief.
It’s the feeling you get when something you love starts changing right in front of you, while everyone around you keeps insisting it’s “just a tool” and you should “adapt”. It’s the kind of loss that’s hard to explain because nothing has technically been taken away yet… yet still something feels off.
The reason it hits so hard is that we live in an incredibly specialised society, and a big chunk of our identity is tied to what we do. Ask someone what they do and watch how quickly it turns into who they are. If you’re a dev, the craft leaks into everything. Work, identity, friendships and even the jokes you make.
When you enjoy building systems, you experience it as a way you move through the world. So, when AI starts chipping away at parts of that craft, the first punch isn’t “oh no, my job”.
It’s something closer to: “if the machine can do that, what does that make me?”
It makes us human. Quite annoying, I know.
Everything Changes, Nothing Changes
I’m a bit of an optimist about change and progress. History tends to repeat the same rhythm to make it work out: everything changes, nothing changes (or, as I prefer in my Italian dialect, cambia tuto e no cambia gnente).
Everything changes because tools push the boundary of what people can do. However, in substance, nothing really changes because humans keep doing what we always do when that boundary moves. People will always complain, experiment, argue, copy, learn and mess up along the way. Finally, we stumble into a new normal that would’ve looked like science fiction to the previous generation.
The printing press created booksand blew the doors open on knowledge, It sparked moral panic which made literacy ordinary instead of reserved for elite.
Electricity totally rewired labour, cities and our expectations of comfort. It even changed when people slept.
The internet connected us. It shrank distance, democratised knowledge and made truth… weirdly complicated.
AI belongs to that same group of global transformations. It’s more like a multiplier which changes what one person can do with a keyboard and half-decent idea. So yes, it’s going to affect everyone; developers first, because of course it’s developers first.
The Carriage Driver Problem
Let’s take a simple historical example: the advent of cars.
If you were a horse-drawn carriage driver, the first automobiles probably looked like a novelty. Loud, unreliable, expensive toys for rich weirdos.
Then manufacturing improved and the price dropped. Ford showed up and suddenly the whole system started reorganising itself around something new.
If you were a carriage driver you didn’t just lose a job. You watched an entire set of skills, instincts, pride and social value stop being the default.
But the intent didn’t vanish. People still needed to get from A to B: they still needed logistics and someone to keep the whole messy operation working.
The goal stayed the same. Only the tools changed. Those drivers didn’t disappear. And what they did was to adapt and start learning new skills. They stopped reading horses and started learning engines. Same purpose, different muscles.
You may feel inner conflict and resistance about it. Some days you’ll want to lean in, other days you’ll want to throw away your laptop. Both reactions are normal.
Bear one important thing in mind, though: adaptation will not happen if you don’t roll up your sleeves and decide to do it. It’s a choice.
The Frontier
When I say “frontier”, I mean right now, this awkward present, where the tools are suddenly powerful and the rules haven’t caught up, so nobody quite knows what comes next.
There’s a lot of confident storytelling right now. Underneath it, we’re guessing more than we admit.
What we do know is how it lands: through the defaults we ship.
Developers aren’t just being changed by AI. We’re the ones wiring it in.
We decide what gets automated, what gets reviewed, what gets logged, what gets a human in the loop, what gets waved through because “the model said it’s fine”.
You don’t need to predict exactly where this goes in order to influence how it turns out. The new shape of the craft will be decided gradually in code review and small everyday decisions.
The frontier isn’t some distant place: it’s the repository you cloned this morning.
The First Spark
When I’m trying not to overthink all of this, I keep going back to the first time I felt real curiosity about computers.
For me it was creating a calculator in BASIC V2 on my dad’s Commodore 64. Looking back, it feels hilariously trivial like being proud you successfully boiled water.
At the time it felt like magic.
I remember the moment the machine did what I told it to do. Not because it was “smart”, but because it followed instructions precisely. I also remember using Logo and drawing a square for the first time, just a square, but it existed because I made the turtle (well… technically a triangle and a lot of imagination) move.
That feeling is why I’m here in the first place. It’s not status or job security, Not because “I chose a good career”.
The feeling was: I can make a system do something. I can build.
If you’re reading this, you probably have your own version. The first time you made a website, the first script that saved you hours, the first moment networking finally made sense and you realised you could see the invisible.
Dig for that memory.
Not just for nostalgia, but because it will remind you what part of you is always yours, regardless of what tools show up.
Hope as a Discipline
I don’t think hope is something you simply either have or don’t have.
To me, hope works more like a discipline.
Hope is choosing to participate even when your ego is bruised, because competence is strangely addictive. And hope also means letting yourself be a beginner again, which may feel humiliating for people who built their identity around being good at hard things.
Developers are particularly bad at this: we tend to treat not knowing as if it were a bug in ourselves..
Hope, for me, is choosing curiosity on purpose, especially on days when I don’t feel it. Letting grief sit in the passenger seat but keeping my hands on the wheel.
Because AI can change parts of the craft. It can make output cheaper and blur what skill sometimes looks like. But some things don’t become irrelevant just because the tools become more powerful.
Taste and natural human judgement will always matter. And when things break at 3am, it’s still on humans to decide what “fixed” means.
And the core of the job, whatever form it takes, is still taking messy intent and turning it into behaviour you can rely on.
AI can generate and assist you. It can surprise you.
It can’t own.
Where does that leave us?
So yes, change is coming. In many ways it’s already here. It’ll affect devs, designers, writers, artists, and everyone who currently believes their craft is somehow immune to technological change.
We’re allowed to grieve. But after grief, you still get a choice.
You can turn away and calcify, clinging to the old way as if it were morally superior when really it was just familiar. Or you can stay curious and keep building.
We’re still at the frontier. More in the messy sense, where the map is half blank and most of us are improvising as we go.
Frontiers do have one upside though.
The people who show up early get a say in what becomes normal.
So show up. Grieve what’s being lost. Then keep your hands on the wheel and keep going.
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