"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes

Rules of Engagement

In this post we will be talking about some of my thoughts and feelings around generative AI in 2026 and the ways in which it is affecting my day to day work as a middle of the road programmer and an accomplished sysadmin, platform engineer and SRE.

We will not be talking about the morality of AI or its environmental impact. Or about the sus finances around some of the bigger companies that purvey it. Those things have been beaten to death so thoroughly that the horse is beyond dead and the gravestone marking its passing has crumbled to rubble.

The Tide is Turning

For a long time, quite frankly the models weren't really good enough. Sure, you could squeeze code out of ChatGPT and its ilk if you were persistent enough, but over the last several months to a year, they've improved by orders of magnitude and more and more engineers are writing about how they're feeling empowered to, in the words of Bryan Cantrill on the Friends of Oxide Podcast: "Like, yes, the world emphasizes like the the the velocity, which a term that I, again, don't like because it makes us all sound like projectiles. But the this is what it allows us to do is do things that we simply never would have gotten to before that allow for more rigorous artifacts."

And they're not alone. Lots of others have been writing and talking about how they're feeling empowered by generative AI code generation tools in really surprising ways.

And they're being brave, because there is a tremendous ground swell of anti AI sentiment in the industry. If you post things about wins you're seeing from using agentic coding tools to social media, you may well be utterly overwhelmed with barrages of angry messages from people who treat you like some kind of traitor to humanity or a schill of big Capitalism.

But with tools like planning mode, agentic teams and skills, tools like Claude, Amp and Codex really are changing the face of building commercial software in 2026.

The Ugly Truth

And here's the ugly truth about some of the folks screaming the loudest: They're afraid. And heck I DO NOT BLAME THEM. Were I a fresh faced computer science graduate right out of college? I'd be shitting my pants right about now.

Because whether or not AI will replace our jobs (It won't. You still need skilled engineers to write the prompts and recognize that what's coming out of the black box isn't shiny shiny garbage) the perception among the C-suite in our industry is that they can gain substantial "efficiencies" by drastically slashing team sizes and replacing headcount with AI.

They're being incredibly short sighted, and quite frankly I think they're wrong.

BUT that won't stop them from eliminating a ton of jobs and causing people a lot of pain.

It's really hard for a lot of people to accept that the incredible talent and skill they've spent the entirety of their adult lives perfecting is now almost in-arguably worth a lot less than it used to be.

When I, a guy who understands computers pretty well but knows nothing about mobile software development can sit down with Claude Code and in an hour produce an incredibly polished app that runs really well in Android, IOS, Linux, Windows and Mac? That's an almost unimaginably enormous amount of highly specialized human expertise that's just evaporated into the ether.

Ride The Wave, Or Drown. Your Choice.

I am in no way suggesting that everyone MUST use AI tools. I know for a fact that there are still plenty of niche areas where LLMs just aren't very effective yet, as well as folks with incredibly specialized niches who can achieve acceptable velocity and have the luxury of ignoring these tools. Good for them! But when I say your choices here are sink or swim? I'm talking about the average software developer spending their days cranking out database oriented CRUD applications, and boy howdy let me tell you these folks absolutely can benefit from dipping their toe in and at least reviewing these tools.

But heck, I'm not trying to strong arm anyone. If you have moral objections to using AI (There are many, and to be clear they are NOT without merit!) I will wish you luck.

I just know for myself I feel like I've gained super powers. I can pick up side projects that I've been stuck on for years and in a few minutes the AI gives me that boost I need to actually understand what I was missing and get across the finish line. I read the code and make further changes on my own so I can really internalize what the AI did for me. I am treating it like a learning opportunity rather than turning my brain off.

And I'm having fun. I hope you are too. This is a crazy time to work in technology. Let's embrace the coming change and move forward in celebration of the spirit of innovation. Because honestly, what's the alternative?