Chasing Taillights

Last week I tried to keep up. I don't even remember with what anymore. It might have been a new model, a new tool, a new version of something that didn't exist two months ago. By the time I sat down to try it, there was already something newer. The names blur together. By the time you read this, whatever I could name here will be old. That's the point.

I'm a programmer, though I never liked the term. It minimizes what I do, and not because I think what I do is important (fortunately I know the important stuff is elsewhere). It's that writing code isn't most of my time, isn't the hardest part, and isn't even the thing I love. What I love is making. I'd feel the same way building a table or a chair.

Making is making. It's making with others, and more importantly, making for something. The something can be anything, but for me, that purpose is fundamental.

That's what's at stake when I say the last few months brought moments of introspection I'd rather not have. It's not the technology. It's what it might mean for the thing I love. It would be foolish to ignore that. My therapist agrees.

Am I a taxi driver hating Uber?

Honestly? I don't know. I don't know if I'm in denial, or just not seeing what everyone else sees.

What I do know is what I feel: always one step behind. Chasing a car that's faster than me, only catching its taillights. The loop is always the same: something on Twitter, like the one above, screaming that I've been doing it all wrong. That if I change how I work I'll be 10x more productive (do I want to be more productive?) and have $10 million MRR in a month.

Occam's razor says it's bullshit. So why does the loop always win?

In blockchain it was always about chasing the latest novelty. That was the reality. It's fun to use the new thing. Or it was. A few years ago the feeling was there with every new framework or database, and if you didn't try it you were an idiot. As an industry we learned to navigate that without sinking.

The taxi driver's arguments

The taxi driver is me. He works at this every day. He had the luck, or the misfortune, of being a taxi driver before LLMs existed.

The most important thing humans have done in however many thousands of years of evolution isn't any single invention. It's the ability to work in massive groups toward something bigger than themselves, and to communicate well enough to pull it off. I don't yet see how a bunch of matrix multiplications can come and break all of that.

I'd like to see it as a tool. I know that argument is worn out, I know everyone says "it's just a tool," and I know it sounds like cope. But I mean something specific: the hard part of what I do was never the typing. It was understanding what to build, and with whom, and why. A tool that types faster doesn't change that.

We're probably at the same moment as when the steam engine appeared, or electricity, or the internet. The panic is normal. It might even be healthy.

But this is clearly a situation of discomfort. The way we work is going to have to change. It already has, and it will keep changing, probably faster than before. That's where the game is played. Not in whether we adopt the tool, but in how we adapt around it. Our role in this industry, whatever it becomes, will be shaped by that.

By the time you read this, there will be something newer. I still won't be able to keep up. But I'll still be here, making things with people, for something. That part hasn't changed. I don't think it can.