The Writing is on the Wall

We are entering a new era where intelligence is shifting from a scarce resource to an abundant commodity. In the software industry, new models and coding agents are being released and updated not just annually, but daily. The current atmosphere carries the eerie vibe of the night before the meteors hit Earth. Much like the characters in the movie Don’t Look Up - or the dinosaurs wandering around while the sky burned - many are ignoring the inevitable. The fundamental truth that humanity has relied on for thousands of years - that intelligence is rare, requiring organic collaboration and slow, steady civilization building - is gone. This is uncharted territory. We don’t have a definitive answer for what the future looks like yet. However, after several rounds of discussions with engineers - both veterans and those early in their careers - I have found a framework for adaptation. We must become like the rodents who survived the extinction event: smaller, faster, and fundamentally different from the giants of the past.

Running vs. Driving: The New Paradigm

To explain the shift, I use a simple analogy: Running vs. Driving. If your goal is to travel a great distance, training yourself to run 10% faster is pointless if your competitor has a car. The conclusion is straightforward: you must get in the car. In software engineering, “running” is the old way: manual design, manual coding, manual review, and manual testing. In the era of intelligence abundance, this no longer makes sense. You must “drive” by utilizing AI (coding) agents. But getting into the car doesn’t automatically make you a driver. It requires a complete shift in your relationship to the work. Think of this transition through a different lens: moving from a blacksmith’s shop to a semiconductor cleanroom. You are no longer the artisan hammering metal by hand. You are now the operator of a gigantic, high-precision machine - like a photolithography scanner used to make chips. You are wielding a massive, powerful system (the AI) to produce a delicate, intricate artifact (the code). You don’t touch the material with your hands anymore; you adjust the dials. A slight misalignment in your parameters doesn’t just result in a scratch - it destroys the entire batch. Driving is similar. Your machinery weighs thousands of pounds. To survive the transition to machine operator, you must master a few new principles.

1. The First Rule: Don’t Crash

In a car, speed is easy; control is hard. Junior engineers, emboldened by AI that can generate thousands of lines of code in seconds, often do not realize they are careening toward a cliff.

• Understand the machine: You cannot blindly trust the agent. You must understand the limits of the vehicle.
• Verification over creation: Your job shifts from writing code to verifying logic. You are no longer the bricklayer; you are the site inspector.

If you don’t know what a “crash” looks like (security vulnerabilities, hallucinations, logic loops), you will wreck the project before you leave the driveway.

2. Plan a Safer Route

When you are moving fast, you cannot navigate by sight alone. You need a map. In coding terms, this means architecture and scoping take precedence over syntax.

• Modular design: Plan with clear, concise, and consistent scopes. AI thrives on modularity. If you ask an agent to build a monolith, it will fail. If you ask it to build ten connecting components, it will succeed.
• Guardrails: Build a robust structure that contains failure. Since AI is probabilistic, you must engineer deterministic guardrails around it.

3. Act Less to Move Faster

The old instinct is to spec out everything in advance to ensure perfection. This is the “waterfall” mindset of a runner planning every footfall.

• Abandon perfectionism: You do not have time to write perfect specifications for code that will be generated in seconds. Even if you do, the requirements will be obsolete by the time you finish.
• Risk containment: Instead of aiming for accuracy in the first draft, aim for a robust structure that allows for rapid iteration. Think from a risk-management perspective: “If the AI gets this wrong, how easily can I fix it?”
• Strategic laziness: Do less manual work so you can direct more high-level traffic. You turn the steering wheel; you don’t turn the tires by hand.

4. Speed is Both Goal and Leverage

In this new era, speed is not just a metric; it is your survival mechanism.

• The feedback loop: You must move fast. Period. The faster you move, the faster you hit errors, and the faster you correct them. Velocity is your recovery mechanism.
• Velocity as defense: If you are slow, you will be overtaken by the sheer volume of generated intelligence and by your competitors. Your leverage lies in your ability to direct the flow of code faster than the “dinosaurs” who are still debating syntax.

Speed Management: Why You Must Be a “Jerk”

Finally, let’s look at the physics of this transition. Like driving, you shouldn’t focus strictly on the distance (the final outcome), because you often cannot control external factors. You also cannot simply focus on velocity (current speed), because in an AI world, you don’t create the speed - the AI does. The physical variable you control is acceleration (how quickly you gain speed). But to really survive, you need to go one layer deeper. You need to master the time derivative of acceleration. The rate at which you change your acceleration - the sudden jolt you feel when you slam on the gas or hit the brakes - is technically called jerk. Jerk measures how fast you can change your state. In the age of AI, you cannot just move fast, and you cannot just speed up constantly. You must be able to change direction and intensity instantly. You must be able to accelerate the project violently when the AI gives you a breakthrough, and brake instantly when it hallucinates. You cannot see the results of “jerk” immediately - it accumulates over time - but without it, you will drift off the road. So, to the engineers asking how to survive the meteors and the extinction of the old ways, the answer is simple: Yes, to survive this, you will need to be a “jerk.”