I've written before about the pressure to evolve (almost exactly one year ago) in software engineering. At that time agentic generative AI wasn't really a thing and the uncertainty of human roles in this field wasn't quite so distracting.

Things have changed a lot since then, but perhaps not as much as it is tempting to think. As technologists - and especially as engineers - we are almost obsessed with the next best thing technology has to offer. There is something to be said about the dopamine cycle of discovering a new technology and immediately pondering its life-changing impacts. Neurological studies show that our substantia nigra - the brain's dopamine factory - is actually driven more by "absolute" novelty than by how rare or useful a tool actually is. We all know technology news and general narrative loves this cycle of hype and AI has become truly inescapable in this sense. In fact, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute report, awareness of AI tools rose from 78% to 90% from 2024 to 2025 alone, suggesting AI has gone from niche interest to an unavoidable cultural conversation.

But alongside being technologists, we're also human. We naturally feel the pressure that if we don't evolve fast enough, or keep up to date with the latest technique, we'll be ancient by tomorrow.

There is some truth to this. The last 30 years are full of companies who didn't adapt, and they died for it. Survival of the fittest absolutely plays a role here. Add in the forces of capitalism which naturally prioritize shareholder value and capital efficiency over everything else and it isn't surprising that the share of developers who don't see AI as a threat to their job is already slipping from 68% to 64% year over year as of 2025. This trend is moving in only one direction.

The media landscape amplifies this. A brief search of recent AI software engineering articles includes titles like "I Built a Production-Ready Android App in only 5 days. I'm Not Even a Full-Time Developer.", "Will AI Make Software Engineers Obsolete? Here's the Reality", and instant classics like "'It's going to be painful for a lot of people': Software engineers could go extinct this year, says Claude Code creator". The message ranges from optimism to realism to pessimism but the constant is existentialism and uncertainty. Not the kind of thing most people enjoy associating with their long-term career plans.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to wear my doomer hat - not this time at least. I want to add some perspective that the rapid evolution of GenAI exposes clearly.

The truth is that people who are experimenting with AI seriously today are already in the minority compared to the general population, with about 34% of people using it weekly as of 2025. Furthermore, the 2025 Stack Overflow AI Survey found that only 14.9% of professional developers use AI agents at work daily. If you heavily use Claude Code or know what OpenClaw is, you are likely not behind. If you evolved past copying and pasting code from ChatGPT like we did a year ago, you are likely not behind. Odds are that you are in the minority by virtue of being someone who knows something about code and is at least familiar with comparatively advanced GenAI.

Ultimately it is less about having mastered Claude Code with Opus 4.7 and more about the fact that you've maintained the cognitive flexibility to even try it. When our field is shifting weekly, the primary fitness is meta-learning - the ability to be a perpetual student without losing your mind.

My whole point here is not to predict where things are going. I personally don't feel confident that anyone really knows what the future holds regarding AI because we really cannot compare it to anything else. I also don't want people to feel complacent, because working in technology inherently is about constant change. But I do think the daily existential crisis that I know I'm not alone in having could at least be delayed by a couple weeks.

My advice is to do what you do best. Stay up to date with the tech, see how it's practically useful to you, and be open to change. I'm not sure what software engineering will be like on the other side of all this, but with care, perspective, and of course a small amount of luck, we can figure it out.