It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
I catch myself being nostalgic for the early 2000s. The internet felt new. Phones were for calling. Social media had not eaten everything yet. Things seemed simpler.
Then I remember that the early 2000s included a financial crisis that destroyed people’s retirements, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a job market that locked out an entire generation. The things I am nostalgic for, the MSN Messenger conversations, the forums, the sense of possibility, existed alongside genuine suffering that I was privileged enough to miss.
The most successful software I have ever built ran on technology that was embarrassing to admit at the time. PHP when everyone was doing Node. PostgreSQL when everyone was doing MongoDB. Server-rendered HTML when everyone was doing SPAs. Cron jobs when everyone was doing event-driven architecture.
I was embarrassed about these choices at meetups. I felt like I had to apologise for not using the cool stuff. The other developers talked about their microservices and their Kubernetes clusters and I smiled and nodded and went home to my monolith that actually worked.
I used to get bored. Properly bored. The kind of bored where your brain, desperate for stimulation, starts making things up. Connecting random thoughts. Playing with ideas. Inventing problems to solve.
This was where my best ideas came from. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from productivity systems. From staring at walls and letting my mind wander with nothing else to do.
I cannot remember the last time I was properly bored. I have a phone. The phone has infinite content. Whenever boredom threatens, I pull out the phone and the boredom disappears. Problem solved.
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this.
And they will be the last.
This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything?
There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing.
We have not admitted this yet. Bootcamps are still selling the dream. Universities are still churning out CS graduates. Everyone talks about the skills shortage.
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later.
Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it.
The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down.
AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready.
This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are improving faster than anyone predicted. The economic incentives are obvious. The companies building this technology are not doing it for fun. They are doing it because automation at scale is the most valuable thing in human history.
Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta. He poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. He did interviews in virtual environments with cartoon avatars that haunted my nightmares. He insisted this was the future of human interaction.
Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. The metaverse was not a response to demand. It was one billionaire’s science fiction fantasy imposed on the rest of us.
Crypto has been around for over fifteen years now. Bitcoin launched in 2009. Ethereum in 2015. We have had a decade and a half of innovation, billions of dollars of investment, countless startups, multiple boom and bust cycles, and a generation of developers working on blockchain technology.
Name one problem crypto solved for regular people.
Not hypothetical problems. Not problems that might exist in authoritarian regimes. Not problems that only crypto people have because they got into crypto. Real problems. The kind normal people experience and would pay to fix.