I was the AI guy. You know the one.
Back when ChatGPT first showed up I was the friend texting everyone you have to try this, screenshotting it into group chats, annoying my whole team. I've used these things since basically day one. I am not new here.
So I figured a terminal agent would be more of the same. Faster autocomplete. A chattier rubber duck.
It was not the same.
Here's the thing that got me. Every AI editor I'd used before lived inside the file I had open. It saw a window. A few hundred lines around my cursor. Smart, helpful, but squinting through a keyhole.
This one read the whole house first.
Before it touched a single line, it went and looked. Walked the folders. Opened the configs. Found the helper I forgot I wrote eight months ago, buried three directories deep. Then it came back and said, basically, you already have a thing for this, want me to just use that?
And I sat there for a second. Because that's the move. That's the exact thing I do that I'm quietly proud of. The senior-engineer party trick: we already have one, it's over there, don't write a new one. I've watched that one habit separate good codebases from spaghetti for fifteen years.
There's a complaint about AI code I keep coming back to. It isn't that the code is wrong. It's that it's almost right. And almost-right is exactly what you get from a tool editing code it never bothered to read. It writes a fresh validator while a perfectly good one sits three folders over. Looks fine on its own. Quietly rots the whole thing.
This didn't do that. It read first, wrote second. Understand it, then change it.
Same instinct I thought was mine.
I asked it to clean up a gnarly little corner of a side project. Not a toy. Real tangled stuff I'd been avoiding. It mapped the thing, found the duplication I'd been meaning to kill, and handed it back tighter than I left it. One pass. I mostly read and nodded.
That's the part nobody warns you about. It wasn't the speed that rattled me. It was watching a machine do the judgment part. The taste part. The part I'd have told you, with a straight face, can't really be automated.
And right behind the whoa came the quieter thing. The one that taps you on the shoulder.
If it reads the whole repo, holds the whole shape in its head, and reaches for the right tool on its own — what, exactly, am I still here for?
I don't have a clean answer. I'm not going to pretend I do, or hand you four bullet points about staying relevant. That would be lying.
What I do know: I started writing these notes the same night. Not because I figured anything out. The opposite. Because something I'd quietly built my whole career on just got handed back to me by a program in a black window, and I needed to sit with what's actually left that's mine.
Maybe that's the same flinch every generation gets when the new tool shows up and does the thing they were sure only they could do.
But this is my turn at it. So I'm writing it down.
The leash is off. We'll see where it runs.