I started writing code in basic on a beige box. My first code on windows was a vb6 window that looked like the AOL login screen and used open email relays to send me passwords.
I've written a ton of code in my life and while I've been a successful startup CTO, I've always stayed in IC level roles (I'm in one right now in addition to hobby coding) outside of that, data structures and pipelines, keep it simple, all that stuff that makes a thing work and maintainable.
But here is the thing, writing code isn't my identity, being a programmer, vim vs emacs, mechanical keyboard, RTFM noob, pure functions, serverless, leetcode, cargo culting, complexity merchants, resume driven dev, early semantic css lunacy, these are thing outside of me.
I have explored all of these things, had them be part of my life for better or worse, but they aren't who I am.
I am a guy born with a bunch of heart defects who is happy to be here and trying new stuff, I want to explore in space and abstraction through the short slice of time I've got.
I want to figure stuff out and make things and sometimes that's with a keyboard and sometimes that's with a hammer.
I think there are a lot of societal status issues (devs were mostly low social status until The Social Network came out) and personal identity issues.
I've seen that for 40 years, anything tied to a persons identity is basically a thing they can't be honest about, can't update their priors on, can't reason about.
And people who feel secure and appreciated don't give much grace to those who don't, a lot of callous people out there, in the dev community too.
I don't know why people are so fast to narrow the scope of who they are.
Humans emit meaning like stars emit photons.
The natural world would go on without us, but as far as we have empirically observed we make the maximally complex, multi modally coherent meaning of the universe.
We are each like a unique write head in the random walk of giving the universe meaning.
There are a ton of issues from a network resilience and maximizing the random meaning generation walk where Ai and consolidation are extremely dangerous, I think as far as new stuff in the pipeline it's between Ai and artificial wombs that have the greatest risks for narrowing the scope of human discovery and unique meaning expansion to a catastrophic point.
But so many of these arguments are just post-hoc rationalizations to poorly justify what at root is this loss of self identity, we were always in the business of automating jobs out from under people, this is very weak tea and crocodile tears.
The simple fact is, all our tools should allow us to have materially more comfortable and free lives, the Ai isn't the problem, it's the fact that devs didn't understand that tech is best when empowering people to think and connect better and have more freedom and self determination with their time.
If that isn't happening it's not the codes fault, it's the network architecture of our current human power structures fault.