I lived under a cave for a whole year, and when I got out of it, the sun burned my eyes.
Spiritual Retreat
About a year and a half ago, I was sitting in the office where I worked as a software developer. We were laughing at how low-quality were the vibe-coded projects that we were seeing springing up everywhere. I then quit that job for an unique opportunity to study Mandarin in Beijing, fully funded by the Chinese government.
For a whole year, I practically didn’t code. Hell, I didn’t even bring my laptop with me (I bought a new one at about four months there). During this whole time, my life was practically just posting travel pictures and studying the language (I had been studying 4 years prior to getting this scholarship).
This was quite an interesting experience, since by this point it had been 10 years that I had started messing with software, and was always surrounded by engineers like me. There, I had no one to talk about it, my classmates were not developers. So I was oblivious to the news on how AI was affecting my field (I could’ve searched for it, but I didn’t).
So, fast-forward to a year in the future, and I come back to see my dear developer friends again. And only now I catch up with the news.
The Glorious Age of Agentic Engineering
It was quite a shocker on how widespread AI was when I came back. Everyone being forced to use at their jobs, the people who were super against it had gotten soft and recognized there was a place for it, a gazillion plus harnesses to use… a very different landscape when compared to one year ago.
Do you know that tale that says that you can’t boik a frog by throwing it in boiling water? It says that you must slowly turn up the water temperature with the frog in the pan, so it doesn’t realize it’s being boiled. I was relating a bit too much with one of these poor frogs. Coming back to such a different landscape was a really big shocker.
I spent a few months studying the subject, and now I can say I can at least use it (last time I tried coding with it I could barely give it write permissions on my project directory). But I got scared at how better it had become. Better, mind you, not yet good. It’s okay now, it generates useful code, but the abstractions it chooses to do are… confusing, to say the least.
But whatever. The important part is that I never believed it would get to this level of okay-quality. And I also believed it could never replace me, as a developer. So, if I was so wrong about the former, nothing is stopping me from being super wrong about the latter too.
Avoiding Being Replaced
So, being really scared of becoming a dead frog, I decided to start building my own sources of income. If, when working for my boss, I’m at risk of being replaced, I just need to become my own boss. Yeah, it doesn’t sound easy, right? Building stuff that earns a similar amount to a software engineer’s salary is no small feat.
But I’ll try. I’d rather start now, when the models are not yet terminator-grade. Plus, if I can actually do it, it’d be pretty nice to have the freedom to change my workplace every month. Who knows, maybe I’ll do an extra year in China, but without needing the government scholarship.
A one-person company building focused software products and writing about the process.