Embrace the uncertainty

It seems like everyone is trying to make predictions right now. The discomfort of not knowing what the future holds is unbearable, and making a prediction (even a terrifying one) feels better than sitting in the ambiguity. When you can name the thing you’re afraid of, you can at least start planning for it. But not knowing what your life will look like in the future is terrifying.

I was listening to a recent episode of Hard Fork, where economist Anton Korinek joined Kevin Roose and Casey Newton to break down how AI is driving volatility in the stock and labor markets. One of the things that struck me was just how reactive everything is right now due to the collective anxiety in the world. The markets are swinging wildly based on essays and thought experiments… not earnings reports, not economic data. Essays.

Case in point: Citrini Research published “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, a speculative scenario imagining what would happen if AI capabilities kept accelerating at their current rate, which looks like 10% unemployment, a 38% market drawdown, and a consumer economy in freefall since no one is making money anymore to buy things. The authors were careful to label it “a scenario, not a prediction.” They even opened with the framing that this was a thought exercise meant to model an underexplored risk.

Despite that framing, the market reaction was crazy. Bloomberg attributed a stock market decline partially to the piece. Financial analysts scrambled to write response pieces. A 33-year-old researcher published a speculative Substack post on a Sunday and triggered what he himself described as an unexpected market meltdown.

That should tell you everything you need to know about how high the collective anxiety is right now. Not just in tech or on Wall Street… Everywhere. People are so desperate for someone to tell them what’s going to happen that they’ll move billions of dollars on a well-written hypothetical. We’re not reacting to data, we’re reacting to vibes, and the vibes are, understandably, very uncertain.

But here’s the thing: no one actually knows what the future is going to be. Not the researchers, not the analysts, not the AI labs… Nobody has a crystal ball. The Citrini piece is interesting writing, but its author was as surprised as anyone when the market treated his scenario as prophecy. So instead of waiting for someone to hand us the answer, which is never going to come, I think the move right now is to embrace the uncertainty.

Inflection points are moments of opportunity

These moments of deep uncertainty and rapid change have historically been moments of extraordinary opportunity. People are generally not remembered because they did a thing very well. They’re remembered because they did a thing first. And right now, there are a lot of firsts happening.

I am a huge AI optimist. In part because that’s just who I am as a person, I’m always pretty optimistic. But I’m also optimistic because I’ve thought carefully about the alternative, and the alternative is worse. The way I see it, when your options are “have your job transformed and hate it” or “have your job transformed and embrace it,” I’d rather choose the second one. My options right now include being extremely bummed about the current rate of change, letting it get the better of me, and probably losing my job eventually anyway, OR working very hard to envision a future that I actually want to be a part of, where AI makes my work better and more impactful, and doing everything I can to make that happen.

I can’t control whether or not these AI systems exist. They will with or without me. What I can control is learning how to work with them and sharing that knowledge with my friends and colleagues as we do the incredibly tough work of figuring out what the future actually looks like.

That’s not toxic optimism… To use another fairly overloaded term right now, it’s called agency.

Nobody knows the right answer yet for what the future of engineering looks like and that’s incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe everything I’ve been learning about how to work with AI is going to be completely pointless in six months when a new model comes out that can do all of the things I can do. But learning how to work well with these tools is something to hold onto right now. And I don’t think I’m going to regret having learned it.

It’s okay to mourn the future that won’t be

I also want to say something that I think gets lost in the “embrace AI” conversation: it is completely okay to grieve.

Here’s something that feels strange to say out loud: 100% of my code is written with AI now. Not most of it. All of it. I thought the transition would be gradual, like slowly handing the wheel to the robots over time. But it wasn’t. One day I looked up and realized I hadn’t written a line of code “by hand” in weeks. Everything goes through Copilot Chat, and my building looks a lot more like “alright, do this part next,” “here’s a screenshot of the design, match this,” “ah, no, I don’t like this, try this instead.”

If you’d told me that two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. And there’s a lot of mourning that goes into realizing you spent all these years building coding skills, and then asking yourself: what are they worth now?

If you’ve spent years priding yourself on writing clean, elegant code, I can absolutely understand how this moment feels like the ground shifting under you. The thing you were excellent at, the thing that defined your professional identity, is being transformed in ways that feel deeply personal. That’s real, and it deserves to be acknowledged.

Just like when some large decision occurs which changes the trajectory of your life, it’s okay to mourn the parts that will no longer be the way you thought they were.

I think about this a lot in a completely different context: having kids. When I found out that my twins, my last children, were going to be girls, I was genuinely excited. But I also found myself mourning the version of my life that wasn’t going to happen anymore because I wasn’t having a boy. I know that sounds a bit silly in the grand scheme of things, and the sex of your unborn child truly doesn’t determine who they’ll become. But for a long stretch of pregnancy, that’s really the only insight you have into their future lives, so it feels enormous in the moment. (Also, hormones are a trip.)

There was a grief that came with the excitement, because a path I had seen for my future was now closed. It’s healthy to grieve and process those changes as they occur, and for a lot of folks coming to grips with this new reality of how software is built, this is a process filled with grief. But grieving isn’t the same as giving up. You can mourn the old path and still walk the new one with purpose.

There has never been a more fun time to build

I’ve always been a very product-minded software engineer. For me, the code has always been a means to an end, the end being a good product that helps people. And even though it’s weird and uncomfortable that I don’t write code by hand anymore, that shift has genuinely freed up my ability to think more about the product itself. While the AI is building something, I’m thinking about building in scalability with pagination, or how this feature will look for different edge cases across different customer types. I’m queuing up scalability improvements as the next task instead of spending that brain power on the implementation details of the current one.

And there has literally never been a more exciting time to build products than right now. I can build so much more now, so much faster. I can spend my extra brain cycles on the things that actually matter: thinking about customer experience, building accessibility into a project from day one, obsessing over the details that make software genuinely good for the humans using it, instead of spending hours crafting the right for loops or debugging off-by-one errors.

The most surprising thing, though, about all of this: even with all of this speed, the amount of work hasn’t gone down. If anything, it’s increased. The more things you build, the more you realize there’s tech debt to clean up, bugs uncovered by adding features quickly, or edge cases you hadn’t considered. The backlog doesn’t shrink… if anything it just gets bigger. The job of building software isn’t going away. If anything, it’s expanding.

And there is so, so much work left to do. Take accessibility as an example. Right now, roughly 95% of websites are inaccessible. And the bad news is that AI has been trained on all of that inaccessible code, so it’s going to be a long time before these tools naturally produce accessible output. That means humans who care about building software that works for everyone, not just the default case, are more important than ever. The work of building software products that are genuinely useful for humans doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

The uncertainty about where all of this is headed is real, and so is the anxiety and the grief. But so is the opportunity. And I’d rather be someone who looked at this inflection point and decided to build something meaningful than someone who spent it waiting for a prediction to come true.

Nobody knows what’s next. That’s terrifying, and also kind of thrilling. Embrace the uncertainty.