VIDEO
In 1982, skaters were talking about a trick that couldn’t be done. The board had to wrap vertically around your back foot — a full rotation on an axis no skateboard wants to spin on. They didn’t even bother naming it properly. They just called it the impossible.
Then Rodney Mullen did it. Decades later, physicists put a 1000-frames-per-second camera on that trick and found something that genuinely changed how I think about my career as a software engineer.
Because remove the human, and the board reverts to what it naturally wants to do — the average, the probable, the thing it’s done a thousand times. That’s the machine we’re all working with. An LLM without your hands on it falls back to the statistically dominant answer. The foot on the board is the judgment: the design, the trade-offs, knowing what’s worth building at all. And it was never the typing.
That’s what this video is about — the quiet crisis in our profession that isn’t really about AI taking jobs, but about identity, and what a skateboard trick from 1982 taught me about the part of the job that was always ours.
If you want to go deeper, two companion pieces sit underneath this one: I Delegated My Thinking to AI. Now I’m Taking It Back. on rebuilding a workflow around I think, AI fetches — and The Developer Identity Crisis on why the ground felt like it disappeared in the first place.
Keep your foot on the board. That’s the job now. It kind of always was.
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