> The previous captain started a fire because another captain explained internal combustion to him at Captainpalooza 2025, and he wanted to start iterating towards that.

Hey, that's agile!

Such a great write-up!

One of the best things I've read this year. Also one of the worst things I've read this year, actually. But also, I enjoyed reading it.

It sounds like the author shouldn't be in tech. For many, perhaps most of us programming is joy. It's why we started in our teens and have continued for 40 years. This is just a cynical post that adds no new value. We didn't kill the junior training mechanism. Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year. There are valuable things to be said about the impact of AI. This isn't one of them.

Great read. Got absorbed into few scenes. The scene with applauds played in my head as a silent movie with Charlie Chaplin presenting his perfect plans and crowd applauding unrealistically fast (due to under-cranking) with piano playing Super Mario theme in background.

It's one thing to have to cope with the stress of job obsolescence over a generation but the speed has picked up so much that people just feel rushed and paranoid. Never enough time to settle down and feel secure for a bit.

We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.

Very well written article, joy to read, which is getting more rare these days.

Also I think it's always worth repeating the risk of losing long-term institutional knowledge when opting for AI as an explicit replacement for junior devs. Another tragic case of short-term gains prioritized over long-term success.

> A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are.

Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?

I'm doing my best to mimic enthusiasm, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so. I was afraid I was turning into a dinosaur, so I tried to be excited about AI. We can do more with computers, we can build faster, we can prototype, etc. But when you have automation you get people with spreadsheets running the business and this is a little bit too close to an assembly line for my liking.

I guess I'll be in the industry until it eventually spits me out, but if the rippling effects of software being devaluated can be so big that I don't know what I'll even do once this chapter of my life is over.

"AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask." :((( that is sad and so true. Economical thinking should be regulated

> The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was.

This is just not true. Working in tech (starting 1989) was awesome for me for at least 20 years, and tolerable for quite some time after. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers and tech-ignorant MBA decisions, for example -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, collaborating with committed peers, and having (and directly supporting) happy customers was tech heaven.