Back in mid-2024, my college roommate kept telling me to try Cursor and I kept saying no. Why would I spend longer coaxing three prompts out of a bot than just writing the code myself? And here's the thing: I was right. For about a quarter.
But this isn't really a story about tools. It's about a specific kind of grief: watching the line between your effort and the thing existing get shorter, three times, each time for genuinely good reasons. Copilot finished my keystrokes. Cursor wrote the functions I'd already designed. Then I stopped typing out code at all. And somewhere in there, the part made me want to become a software engineer in the first place? Gone. Nobody took it from me, exactly. It just wasn't mine anymore.
Two years in, I was reduced to rubber stamping thousand-line PRs no human wrote, arriving faster than any human could honestly read them. And look, we were shipping. More than ever, in fact. But the person still holding the bar (hi!) had somehow become the one slowing everyone down. So I quit my founding CTO role with nothing lined up.
Here's what I didn't know then, and what I really could have used: it wasn't just me. This is measured now, at industry scale, and I'm bringing the benchmarks. If there's grief on your team about what this job has become, it's real, it's everywhere, and it's not a performance problem.
And then the part that isn't venting is what survived. Guardrails that live on infrastructure instead of my nervous system. Owning what "done" actually means. Here's the weird ending, though: the craft didn't die. It shifted. There's still one question I can't answer: what is code review even for when the author is an agent? I'll tell you where I've landed and where things are going (for now)!
This talk has been presented at AI Coding Summit NYC, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.
