Automate everything mindset
Up until last week I was still crafting some code by hand. Not only that, I was also reviewing AI generated code line by line. Times have changed so rapidly in the last couple of weeks. The question is how to stay relevant as just a human in the AI era? What new habits need to be created and which ones should die in fire never to be reborn again?
Only couple of months ago I was sure that there is no chance in the world that AI will write 100% of the Alpha Code codebase. Can you believe, our shiny code turning into slop? No way. To be fair, at that time generated code was not even mid level, it was really a mess for a human to grasp all the meanings inside this big ball of mud, but it worked. Then a realization struck me. Code is not meant to be read by humans anymore. This was the illusion for 25 years that "code" is the final abstraction. The emperor is not wearing clothes moment has arrived. English is meant to be used by humans, not some classes, modules or functions.
We are fighting the wrong battle. Instead of embracing this realization from the begining, years of learning how to code were now standing in the way. All the efforts invested into crafting beautiful software to brag on social media, all the happy customers that hired us to cleanup their codebases, all of it is now under threat. What rational human being could let go the feeling of complete control over the codebase that affects thousands of people to something not even human? What a scary thought.
As the time passed, I was more and more exhausted by trying to control every line agent produced. That was the most miserable I have ever felt. Is this it? Being tab monkey for the agent? There must be something I can do...
Ironically, with the help of the agent I switched from Cursor to tmux and Neovim. This was the click that saved my sanity. I was again in control. Learning all the nuances of a new development environment was not a walk in the park. It was quite a challenge to remember all the useful vim motions and different ways to navigate. A great place to start was identifying all the features from Cursor that were part of my workflow and try to find something similar in Neovim. The key here is to keep it well optimized for YOU. The goal is not to be the best in Neovim. Learn as you go, experiment and keep iterating.
What Neovim forces people to do is whenever repetitive action occurs, that's the trigger to step back and think about how to make this more efficient. I took this mindset of endless quest for efficiency and applied it to work processes.
Identify patterns
Instead of manually going through the whole software delivery pipeline, taking ticket from the board, writting code and tests, opening browser and clicking around and finally pushing changes to Git platform, this is a nice opportunity to apply some sort of automation, especially when steps are clear as in this case.
Most of the time this process gets encapsulated as a skill. Skills help breaking down each step inside process so it is easier to see where the most time is spent. On a rare occassion you will get this right first try, but iterating on this document is a must as the flow changes or a more efficient way of working gets discovered. The best part is that your agent can curate this file with context from previous sessions. Skills need to be pruned from time to time because bloated skills can harm the agent's judgement.
Keep experimenting
AI has made me fall in love with computers all over again. Every obstacle is cleared in no time with simple explanation. People can focus on trying new things out and immediately get feedback whether this if for them or not. Shaping systems and workflows to suit you and your needs is the next era of software development. This should in theory open the door for more brilliant ideas being delivered through pixels on the screen in literally no cost. Those long nights debugging are going to be missed, but in their place will come something else, hopefully a bit less scary.
Summary
I would love to see the world where each individual is specialized in their niche domain and we end up with 8 billion unique companies. Each of us can use AI as a mentor available 24/7 and learn anything of interest. What a fairytale in the making!
If you are curious, check out my dotfiles.
Published on September 4, 2026