As I approach 46 years of age, I never thought I’d be competing with robots for just about everything I care about but here we are living the nightmare.

Computing and music have always been tethered to my creative process in one way or another my entire adult life. Until the sudden emergence of Generative A.I I assumed this alliance would never change. Of course humans would always be in charge of the programming and thinking process.

My early career was in construction and more specifically swimming pool construction. I hated it, and I slowly overworked my body and destroyed my back and pelvis. I still suffer those battle wounds even today. I decided around 2015 to change my career and finally dive into my interests in tech to become a professional programmer. It took a heroic effort of studying long into the nights after working an intense physical job to get there. Honestly it almost broke me.

Fast forward to today and I’m a well paid software developer. I have watched as my value as a developer erode as A.I has increasingly pushed its way into my industry. It is now company policy to leverage A.I in our day to day coding tasks. At first it made such stupid mistakes I laughed at its responses to my first attempts at prompting it to code for me. By the time I was able to get it to do what I wanted in our behemoth enterprise codebase, I could have just coded it myself.

Enter Claude Sonnet 4 and things have dramatically changed. I’m now, down right spooked. The robots are coming for my job and my company is having me train them to replace me soon. I’m not alone, every company is in an arms race. They are captured just as much as I am as an individual. If they don’t boost productivity and lower costs to shareholders, they get swallowed by a bigger fish. Seeing what my company is doing as evil isn’t a helpful assessment. It’s what all companies under capitalist incentive structures must do to survive. I’ll leave that can of worms for another day.

My mind is racing now, running the logic through and always coming to the same conclusion. The abstraction layer of development has moved from coding to systems architecture and A.I context management.

You can either reject it wholesale and be completely steamrolled by it or you can ride this wave to the next event horizon. I have to make a strategic choice, be pragmatic, and give up my attachment to the craft of coding and embrace the prompt.

I believe this choice is being faced by all knowledge professionals and to make the wrong choice is to become outdated and redundant.

To all the Luddites on the outside looking in, I say, it’s easy for you to reject wholesale when your nuts are not in a vice. Human lives are at stake. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not getting shut. I’d love to stand on pure principles and reject it too but that is a nonstarter when you have invested this much of your life into something. I can’t go back to blue collar work at my age with this broken body. It’s a nonstarter. You can hate the humans who utilize A.I if you want but just know that it’s not as black and white as you might think in the analysis of cost vs benefit and what is more, professionals are having it shoved down their throats by executive boards seeing nothing but profit margins. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we aren’t worried to death too.

A.I whether you like it or not is here to stay and for all the negativity it has real positive impact too. We are making strides in medicine and physics due to the power of generative A.I. it’s all a question of can we change ourselves to align with the responsibility of such power? Can we enact the political will to give humanity the dignity of basic human rights as the robots take all of our jobs?

We have a rough road ahead and there will be real human casualties in this paradigm shift. I believe that rejection of A.I is a mistake. It only leaves you more vulnerable. We didn’t make the choice to have it, it was forced upon us. We can make the choice to meet the challenge of our time head on.

It’s ok to be upset. Just don’t let it stop you. A.I has the potential to destroy us or help us, the choice is ours. In the end, the scary thing is the open question, the event horizon, the black hole of our singular times.