It’s 00:30 and I’m watching a video from a dev on X. “I was a 10x engineer. Now I’m useless.” The guy talks about how his brain refuses to code manually, how GPT 5.4 and Codex atrophied his ability to write code. He deployed without review, blind trust in AI, and it worked. But he feels empty.
I see myself. My brain is fried. I certainly couldn’t code a single line manually like I used to. The TypeScript patterns, the shortcuts, the muscle memory, all of it eroded without me noticing.
So I left a comment. And while writing it, I realized something about myself that I’d never put into words this clearly:
“I’m having way more fun on my projects. I think because from the start, i wasn’t interested in providing ’technical’ solutions to people, rather i just want to help people. LLM’s give me the ability to see my users relief faster. And to express what i had always wanted faster.”
I never mourned losing my ability to code. Not for a second.
Why he suffers and I don’t
I think it’s an identity thing. The dev in the video, his entire value was in technique. Algorithmic elegance, clean architecture, language mastery. That was who he was. When LLMs took that capability, they took a piece of him.
Me, I was never a technician at heart. I spent years on Angular, NestJS, clean architecture. I’m glad I did. But that wasn’t what defined me. What defines me, and I’m realizing this more and more clearly, is that I want to help people. Code was just the path I found to get there.
So LLMs didn’t take my identity. They actually removed something that was standing between me and what I really wanted to do. And that’s why I’m having more fun now. I’m building Bienvenue, Candineo, ScanR, projects where I see the impact directly. I see people’s relief faster. I can express what I’ve always wanted more quickly.
That same evening, I come across a tweet from @signulll (868K views) that says: “Building is no longer hard. The variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it.” And it puts words on something I’d been feeling without knowing how to express it. What changed isn’t that AI codes better than me. It’s that coding isn’t the hard part anymore. What’s become rare is knowing what to build, in what order, and why.
He proposes a name: “product thinker.” Someone who understands what’s technically possible, who understands what resonates with people, and who knows how to tell the product’s story. In January, in Hello World, I talked about the Product Engineer, PostHog’s concept. Two months later, the concept has evolved in my head. The Product Engineer was still rooted in “I code but I think product.” The Product Thinker is something else. Someone whose value comes from the decisions they make, not the code they produce. And thinking about it, that’s exactly what I’ve been naturally drifting toward for months without putting a name on it.
What this stirs up
What struck me tonight is that AI doesn’t create an identity crisis. It exposes an identity that wasn’t solid. The dev in the video had built all his value on technique. When technique became a commodity, his value collapsed with it. Me, I was lucky, or maybe it’s just my nature, my value was never in that.
In AI amplifies what already existed, I wrote that AI doesn’t compensate for a fuzzy process, it exposes it. It’s the same with identity. If your identity relied on the fact that you could code what others couldn’t, and now everyone can code, what’s left?
Around me I see the same thing taking shape. Not a split between those who use AI and those who resist. More between those who had put all their identity in code and those who had put it elsewhere. The first group struggles. The second does what they’ve wanted to do for a long time, just faster.
People sometimes ask me “will AI replace developers?” I don’t know. But the question I ask myself is more like: who was I really, underneath the code? What was left of me if you took away Angular, NestJS, TypeScript? For me the answer is: everything that actually mattered.
My brain is fried for manual coding. But I’ve never had this much clarity on what I want to do.
References
- @atmoio: “I was a 10x engineer. Now I’m useless.”
- @signulll: “The most underrated hire is a product thinker” (868K views)
- DX Research: 93% of Developers Use AI (121K developers measured)