Are You Feeling Like Crap With the Emergence of AI?

Last week I was feeling a bit down.

Receiving demands, creating prompts, reviewing changes, approving or denying responses, rewriting prompts, adjusting context, and repeating this cycle over and over.

At some point, this started to corrode me inside.

Because I like to program.

I like to create algorithms, connect classes, think about modeling, do dependency inversion, organize responsibility, name an abstraction well, and see an architecture start to breathe. There’s a very alive part of my relationship with software that has always gone through this: hand-written code.

And when AI started to occupy that space more forcefully, I felt a real loss.

It wasn’t just technical discomfort. It was wounded ego too.

Hand-written code was one of the things that most oxygenated my professional identity. It was where I felt useful, capable, sharp. So, when generative AI started to seem capable of eliminating exactly that limitation, I felt smaller.

I felt, yes, like crap.

When the Crisis Isn’t Technical

Maybe you’re going through this too and aren’t saying it out loud.

Because there’s an almost silent pressure in the air: to seem excited all the time. As if any discomfort with AI were fear of evolution. As if all resistance were disguised incompetence.

But it’s not always that.

Sometimes what’s hurting isn’t the tool.

It’s realizing that a part of the work in which you deposited pride, pleasure, and sense of value stopped occupying the same place.

This messes with identity. And professional identity, when shaken, hurts more than we like to admit.

I Decided to Take the Opposite Path

Instead of diving headfirst into code to feed my ego and well-being, I tried something else.

I decided to learn more about AI.

I decided to prove to myself that I was bigger than the part of me that was feeling replaceable.

I remembered the typists at the emergence of the computer. Many good people who saw the tool change and needed to face the temporary humiliation of relearning their own craft. Not because they were less capable, but because the terrain had changed.

I realized I was entering that same turbulent water.

And, if I was already inside it, swimming seemed better than pretending the current didn’t exist.

The Text That Hit Me

In this search, I read the article The Phoenix Architecture: Relocating Rigor, The Discipline That Looks Like Recklessness, by Chad Fowler, published on January 6, 2026.

The text hit me because it named a sensation I was experiencing, but still without sufficient vocabulary to explain.

In one of the strongest passages, the idea is roughly this: certain changes in software history seem like freedom because they remove known control signals, but in reality they just move rigor closer to reality.

This deserves to be chewed slowly.

Not All Loss of Control Is Loss of Rigor

For a long time, software engineering got used to associating seriousness with certain symbols.

Detailed plan.

Extensive document.

Beautiful schedule.

Heavy process.

Lots of manually written code.

All of this gives a sense of control. And sense of control calms.

But sensation isn’t truth.

The point of Chad Fowler, the way I read it, is that some changes seem to remove discipline when, in practice, they just prevent us from faking progress.

Before, it was possible to hide behind artifacts.

Today, increasingly, the system responds.

The test passes or fails.

The deploy breaks or goes up.

The generated code works or becomes debt.

The user receives value or doesn’t receive.

When he says these changes bring rigor closer to the truth, I understand it this way: they push discipline to a less performative and more verifiable place.

You stop seeming productive and start needing to prove there was result.

The XP Example Is Still Current

A passage from the text talks about how Extreme Programming (XP) replaced phased development.

XP eliminated long plans, extensive design documents, and those rigid steps that gave organizations a sense of security. And this, for many people, seemed irresponsible.

But the provocation is exactly this: did those artifacts deliver real security or just the appearance of it?

Because XP didn’t remove discipline.

It removed certain symbols of discipline and put others in their place.

Test before code.

Continuous integration.

Short feedback.

Frequent delivery.

Constant review.

Rigidity moved from bureaucracy to direct contact with software reality.

This is extremely important now, because AI is forcing a similar movement.

The Part That Undid Me

There’s another idea from the text that hit me head-on: generative AI seems to eliminate the main limitation, which is hand-written code.

This is where I recognized myself defenseless.

Because this hand-written code wasn’t just an operational activity for me.

It was a source of self-esteem.

It was the place where I felt mastery.

It was where my ego breathed.

It was where I could look at what I did and think: I built this.

When that space seems to shrink, the initial sensation isn’t “how interesting, a paradigm shift.”

The sensation is incompetence.

It’s wondering if what made you valuable has now become detail.

It’s thinking that your professional utility has been reduced to reviewing a machine’s work.

And that weighs.

The Turning Point for Me

But the passage I really needed to read came later: the answer isn’t to reject generation. The answer is to relocate discipline.

When I read this, a lot of things started to make sense.

Because the problem wasn’t exactly the AI generating code.

The problem was I was looking for my value in the old place, while the real work was changing address.

If before a large part of rigor was in writing each line, now an increasing part of it can be in specifying better, delimiting context, creating invariants, designing good contracts, defining acceptance criteria, assembling decent tests, and judging with severity what was produced.

This isn’t less engineering.

This continues to be engineering.

It just doesn’t deliver the same immediate emotional reward of typing everything with your own hands.

And maybe that’s exactly why so many people are feeling strange and can’t explain why.

Cheap Generation Isn’t Evolution

Another phrase from the text that I think is important to nail down is this idea: cheap generation without rigor isn’t a new paradigm. It’s abdication.

This needs to be said very directly.

Using AI to dump code without understanding, without validation, without testing, without criteria, and without responsibility isn’t modernity.

It’s just uncritical outsourcing of thought.

There’s no real advance in trading manual effort for intellectual passivity.

If the AI produces faster, then my judgment needs to become more rigorous.

If the cost of generating fell, the cost of accepting anything needs to rise.

If the machine amplifies my execution capacity, I need to amplify my discernment capacity along with it.

It’s this balance that separates engineering from abandonment.

So What Do I Do With This Discomfort?

Today, my answer is this: I don’t want to fight to artificially preserve an old format of my utility.

I want to understand what the new way of working well is.

I want to continue liking software, even if the center of gravity of the profession is shifting.

I want to remain technical, but without romanticizing a past that won’t return.

I want to learn to operate in this new scenario without becoming a hostage to it.

I want to maintain rigor.

I want to maintain authorship.

I want to maintain responsibility.

Even if all this now manifests in a different way.

A Closure Still Open

I haven’t finished this process.

I didn’t come out of this reading with all the answers.

I didn’t become an AI evangelist overnight, nor did I stop feeling nostalgia for that more artisanal joy of writing software line by line.

But I came out better than I went in.

I came out with less sense of incompetence.

I came out with less shame for the discomfort I was feeling.

And, mainly, I came out more motivated to seek this new way of working, instead of standing still lamenting the loss of the old form.

Maybe that’s the maximum honesty I can offer now.

I’m still understanding what this change does to the profession.

And also what it does to me.

But I no longer feel incapable.

I feel in transition.

And, for this moment in my life, that’s already a lot.

My thanks to Chad Fowler for the article. Some readings don’t completely resolve the crisis, but they put a name to what was hurting. And, sometimes, that’s exactly where recovery begins.