Yes, AI might take our jobs.
But it also gave me back something I thought I'd lost forever: the actual fun part.
I started coding in early adolescence, not because I had a career plan, but because I wanted to make my Hi5 and MySpace profiles look different from everyone else's. Custom themes. Frankenstein CSS. The particular joy of breaking something, fixing it, then breaking it again on purpose. I was not thinking about the job market. I was a builder before I knew that was a word for it and I became a developer because building things is the most satisfying thing I know how to do.
Almost twenty years later, I'm a machine learning engineer. I've paid for AI subscriptions since before it was cool or rather, since before it was terrifying. I test new models the week they drop, follow the Claude Code ecosystem like some people follow the sport news, write my own tooling. I use this stuff daily and I try to use it right. I am not in denial about what it is.
And yet the conversation I keep having in group chats with developer friends, is always the same spectacular spiral. Will agents replace us? Is deep understanding dying? Are we just prompt jockeys now? Someone drops a model release link and within minutes we're deep into professional anxiety dressed up as technical debate. I participate every time, because the concerns are real. But lately something else has been quietly happening for me.
Yes, AI is eating the parts of the job that used to feel like actual thinking. Yes, there's a generation of developers who might never develop the intuition that comes from genuinely wrestling with a system until it breaks in an interesting way. These are legitimate griefs, and they deserve to be discussed instead of buried under corporate enthusiasm about "productivity multipliers."
The irony of me, someone whose entire professional value proposition is optimizing systems so that fewer humans need to make decisions, worrying about displacement is not lost on me. I'm just not stopping there.
Meanwhile, on nights and weekends, a different story.
I have been the most creatively productive version of myself in years and it has nothing to do with my actual job.
I have side projects. Functioning side projects. Tools I'd wanted for years but never had time to build because learning a new stack from scratch while working full-time is a fantasy you have at 23 and then quietly abandon. The gap between "I have an idea" and "I can execute on this idea" used to be enormous, filled with prerequisite knowledge I didn't have, documentation rabbit holes, three hours lost on something that should have taken twenty minutes. That gap has narrowed to the point where the bottleneck is now actually having ideas, which is a much more interesting problem to have.
Working on things outside my domain, with AI as a very patient and well-read collaborator, has taught me more about those fields than years of "I should really read about this" ever did. Not PhD-level depth. But real, working knowledge, the kind you get from building something that breaks and having to understand why. I'd rather have that than theoretical deep knowledge living permanently in a to-read list I'll never finish.
What this is actually about.
The conversation we keep having is almost entirely about AI as a professional threat. And it is a professional threat to some extend; I'm not here to talk you out of that. But there's a parallel conversation we're not having: about what AI gives back to people who got into this field because they loved making things and somewhere along the way turned into people who mostly attend meetings about making things.
That kid tweaking MySpace CSS at midnight wasn't thinking about career capital. She was thinking about whether the cursor trail would look cooler in blue or gold. At some point the job ate that feeling whole. What I didn't expect was that the same technology everyone's grieving over would be the thing that handed it back.
The job market might get strange. It might get very strange. But right now, in this specific window, people with ideas and the technical literacy to direct their execution have a kind of leverage over reality that didn't exist five years ago. That's worth holding alongside the anxiety.
The group chat will keep spiraling. I'll keep showing up to it. But I'll also keep shipping weird little tools that solve problems only I have and being genuinely delighted and proud by the fact that I can. That's not a rebuttal to the doom. It's just the other side of it.