You may think that AI made everything faster. Truth is - AI made everything compact. And it’s not a good thing.
Planning horizon got compacted
Just recently, I’ve been looking at the Long Term Planning slide - one of those things that in “before AI” days I would treat as “wishful thinking”. No plan survives the reality check after all, why treat it seriously? This plan was only half full - 2028 had almost nothing, except maybe some project-wide technical debt that is always there. And why is that? Well, first of all, the things that were planned for it have now been shifted. And probably the first time, they shifted to earlier. And not because priority had changed, not because the CEO is now hyped on a new buzzword. It’s just simpler now. All the usual ‘play it safe’ planning tricks aren’t necessary - no more ‘add a few months there, if things go wrong’. Things will go wrong, surely, but adjusting to change has never been easier. Being ‘agile’ was a headache before; now it is almost effortless. Plus, it is actually possible to hit diminishing returns now. You can reach ‘good enough’ by the end of the year. You may think that it is awesome. If you do, you probably are a Project Manager and want to scale the Planning slide horizontally at least 50%.
Timing to burn out got compacted
You may be expected to do things in permanent emergency mode - code takes less time to happen, but the amount of code that you can understand remains at the same level. Even without managerial pressure, you might still push yourself too far. 10k lines of code a day might sound great, but it’s a burden. Working in teams, especially big ones, will multiply the effect. Having a big team before meant a bigger safety net, greater agility to change, and greater capacity. Now, each person is a source of huge Merge Requests that are coming your way. But your biological hardware has the same limits. A mid-level engineer with a burst of inspiration and an energy drink can shoot huge chunks of code your way every evening. Surround yourself with 5-10 of those, and your performance review will be just an empty sheet. Add a Project Manager, who scaled a slide and a CEO who wants blockchain, and you may start to consider alternative career opportunities.
Bus factor got compacted
You can take on things that you’ve never worked on before. Hell, even languages aren’t important. Yes, you have to know things - that is still there - but there is no excuse to not be a generalist. Writing a web app in Typescript without knowing it well is now possible. I made a Postman-styled tool to test security policies in 10 days, and certain parts are written in a way I never would - I just don’t know Typescript that well. Code can be horrible and valuable at the same time. It is not a discussion on quality with such an approach, but the possibility is there. Code can be dissected line by line, read through, and at the end, you might become better at writing it - but that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Code seniority got compacted
Code ownership no longer means the same thing. You were spending hours with a colleague at a whiteboard, explaining the architecture. Now they can have the same thing explained in the way they understand better, with mermaid graphs or god forbid UML. Before they could nag you about things he missed or did wrong. Now they can spam Claude any time of the day, get a working fix, textual pat at the back and ‘absolutely correct’ as a result.
That is the reason why I think ‘code’ seniority means less and autonomy means more. A ‘Junior’ that can understand your architecture and domain on its own, capable of seeing its gaps in learning and able to deliver without distracting others will survive. A ‘Senior’ who needs guidance will struggle. Code-wise, now everyone is at least middle. All the advice before about being more independent at work moved from “it’s nice to have for your career” to “day-to-day expectation”. That means title inflation finally got its devaluation. Senior today means the same as before, but on a single axis. Agency remains the one that moves you up the ladder. It’s not the “what you can do” anymore - it’s “how much support do you need?”
That is why it feels like a gearshift - I can do more on my own. And this is why I believe that operating autonomously is important. You are your own company - a company of one. Don’t expect someone else to stop by and tell you what to do - everyone is busy burning out with their own things. Make sure you understand what you do well, because nobody is coming to fix things for you.
‘Let’s rewrite it in Rust’ was a joke. Now it will take a month.