Nothing scares me anymore: Coding with AI is a superpower I didn't ask for

It makes me faster, but I didn't ask to go faster. Like someone who suddenly gets a superpower, is it irresponsible to not use it? Does the answer change when everyone was given the superpower?

I struggled to call myself a developer for years because it felt like I hadn't earned it. Eventually, I put the nights and weekends in. I studied Computer Science, had multiple internships, built side projects, contributed to open source. I still write code on the weekends because it's fun. Or... I have Claude write code for me.

There's the thing. I like building things. I like refactoring things. I like when ideas are cleanly represented in code. Vibe coding feels like I'm giving up part of why I like creating software to accelerate the other part.

The split

When I crank out a PR with Claude, I feel split. I'm happy because the work is done fast and I feel productive. But there's this guilt around it, like I didn't earn it. The implicit exchange rate has always been time spent = value produced. I'm suddenly depositing checks I didn't work for.

When I know what I want to accomplish (e.g. create a new hook that hits an endpoint) it feels like a loss to not use AI. I'm not learning anything by rolling another hook. I've done it hundreds of times – the learning happened years ago. Now it's about execution and execution feels fine to optimize. But when the execution is optimized, something else happens. Nothing scares me anymore. It feels like I can accomplish anything with LLMs.

That sounds like confidence but reads like loss.

The fear was information

The fear told me where the edges of my knowledge were. What challenges would help me grow if I pushed through. If nothing triggers that signal anymore, either I've mastered everything (I haven't) or the signal is broken. The capability is borrowed. The LLM can get me to the other side of a scary problem without me ever actually crossing it myself. The fear goes away because I get the output without spending time.

I've earned my wisdom by cutting my teeth writing software for 10+ years without LLMs. Does that experience fade? Architectural intuition, knowing when something smells, and understanding why a pattern exists is probably durable. I built mental models over a decade, they don't evaporate because I'm generating hooks faster.

But what if my knowledge stops compounding? The decade of teeth-cutting gave me a rate of learning. I got faster at getting better. If I outsource the struggle, I keep the principal but lose the interest.

Where I am now

Software engineering isn’t 100% gone, but it's...different, and I don't know if that's better or worse.

It's like someone took your favorite book, replaced all the pages, but the cover is still the same. I still open Vim. I still push commits. I still call myself an engineer. From the outside, nothing changed.

But I remember what was on the pages before. And the new pages are fine, maybe even good, but they're not the pages I fell in love with. The book that made me stay up late and made me feel like I’d found my thing. That book is being rewritten in real time and I don't get a say in the new draft. It was never about the story, it was about that specific book. The parts that were hard and the parts that clicked and the feeling of turning pages I earned.

I wonder how much of this anxiety and guilt would be removed if I knew definitively what the future holds for my job. If it stays exactly how it is today, great. It would be brutal if the future is "engineering as we know it is gone, find something else", but at least I could plan.

I don't get either. I wake up every day and wonder, "is today the day the floor shifts? Is the next model the one that makes me optional?”. I can't plan for a future I can't see, so I hold both possibilities at once and the weight is exhausting.

The way I became myself isn't the way I'll stay myself going forward. I built an identity through a door that's closing behind me.