Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings. I've been enjoying spring, and yesterday I went to watch the sunset at Baker Beach.

I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• I'm running the 2026 Bay to Breakers and also donating to the San Francisco SPCA. (If possible) Help me get to the donation goal, any amount helps! :)
• Today's topic reminded me of this quote from Sadhguru's Inner Engineering: They forget that 'I do not know' is the doorway—the only doorway—to seeking and knowing.

The more I integrate AI into my day-to-day work, the more I ask myself why I'm still here.

If AI can help me write code, summarize context, generate drafts, explain unfamiliar APIs, and move through a codebase, then what is the part of the work that still feels like mine?

I can parallelize a bit more (#trustmebro), but I also spend time reviewing and correcting. The work changes shape, but it doesn't go away entirely.

Junior dev for life

A few years ago, Dan Abramov had this tagline: "junior dev for life".

I remember it stirred a few conversations. Was it useful to call yourself that? Was it dismissive of actual junior developers? Was it a weird thing to say once you already had status in the industry?

I set those conversations aside and used the tagline as a reminder of beginner's mind.

That framing has stayed with me because software engineering is one of those fields where you are almost always a beginner. The basics last, and certain patterns repeat over and over again, but the work keeps moving.

There is always a new framework, a new runtime capability, a new platform primitive, a new way teams are organizing their systems, or a new set of constraints you didn't have before.

Even if you stay within a single stack, the stack is not really standing still.

The comfort of being new

I think this is what keeps me here.

I enjoy that feeling of being a neophyte at something. In the sense of having a fresh area to explore. There is always a corner where I don't know enough yet.

There is a temptation, as you get more experience, to rely too much on what has worked before. You know the patterns. You know the failure modes, etc.

AI has made my biases more tangible to me. It makes me confront the quality of my own questions. If I ask from a narrow frame, I get narrow help. If I assume the old constraints remain true, the tool will happily operate within them.

Learning from newer eyes

This is also why I'm always interested in learning from newcomers to the field.

Their minds are often more open to possibilities because they haven't fully internalized all the constraints yet. Sometimes that means they suggest something impractical. Sometimes it means they ask the question everyone else stopped asking.

The same thing happens with peer teams. A team working in a different domain might be attuned to solving problems in ways that feel unnatural to me. They might optimize for different tradeoffs, use different languages, or carry different scars from previous incidents and migrations.

Beginner's mind as a practice

I don't think being a "junior dev for life" means pretending experience doesn't matter.

Experience matters a lot. It helps you pattern-match, avoid traps, manage trade-offs, and make better decisions with incomplete information.

But I do think it means keeping some part of yourself available to being wrong, surprised, and just experiencing something all over again.

It means asking basic questions in rooms where people expect you to already understand everything. It means letting someone newer explain their view without rushing to "correct" it. It means noticing when your certainty comes from judgment and when it comes from habit.

AI hasn't made me feel less needed in software engineering. It has made me more aware of what I enjoy about it.

I like the learning loop. I like the moment when a system starts making sense. I like watching someone else approach a problem from a direction I would not have chosen. I like realizing that the thing I thought was obvious was only obvious because of the path I took to get here.

Maybe that's what keeps me here.

Your turn!

What keeps you engaged in your work? Is it mastery, learning, impact, people, or something else? Let me know by replying to this email!

Happy coding!