At this point, it’s clear: we are all going to die.

Or at least our jobs are and we are going to be unemployed and best case scenario is to try to requalify. The planet might follow. AI is eating electricity, water, and entire professions. Our kids will probably grow up in some anti-utopia, picking between different flavors of broken futures. Huxley or Gibson – will see. Choose your anti-utopia.

Good times.

Among web devs I see a trendng disucssion with several groups: the overhyped but positive, the skeptics who say this is a waste of time and will never work and the third – those who already think we’re doomed. I was in the second group with the skeptics until about six months ago. I think that group probably missed the latest developments. After years of playing with boring AI most of us gave up on it – but then AI suddenly changed. Devs say:

• Programmers will forget how computers actually work. Fewer people will understand what’s happening under the hood. Debugging will feel like arguing with a ghost.
• People will get… lazier. Why struggle through a problem when you can just ask and get “something” back?
• How are we supposed to find junior developers?
• If AI is doing the entry-level work, where do beginners even start?

Also, this whole AI coding trend doesn’t feel like craftsmanship. It feels fast, messy and a bit soulless.

I think we’ve been here before. Here’s the part we forget. There was a time when there were no senior web developers. In the mid or late 90s, if you were building websites, you weren’t following a career path – you were just messing around and somehow ended up with a job title later. People started by curiosity. They didn’t care about best practices – they barely existed. They didn’t know where this was going.

A lot of them didn’t understand deeper computer science topics either – things like memory management, low-level optimisations. And still… they built the web. They solved different, new problems. Problems that more serious programmers didn’t think mattered. At the beginning you didn’t knew about Martin Fowler, Spolsky, Jeff Atwood and still they shaped your career.

Nobody promised remote work, high salaries or stable careers. They were just building stuff. Who knew you would be hired as an SEO specialist working for a startup halfway around the world? We didn’t even have this as a job title.

Developers were even laughed at. Using PHP? JavaScript? That wasn’t “real programming”. It didn’t have prestige. It didn’t look serious. They probably bloated the internet with tables, before smart people came up with web standards and showed us CSS and divs. 30 years later they have a successful career with a title that didn’t exist back then.

Now it’s our turn. In my opinion, what’s happening now with AI is not new – it just feels new because it’s happening to us.

Before, it happened to: lithographic retouchers, paste-up artists, phototypesetting workers, draftsmen, print journalists. More recently with bank clerks – imagine their fear when the bank told them it will prioritise mobile banking as opposed to hiring humans. Their skills mattered – until they didn’t. And now we’re watching the same thing happen again. Now some of the same developers are panicking and afraid of what AI brings to the table. As a high-impact mobile developer you probably destroyed worlds as well. The ecommerce web shop that you helped built probably killed a brick-and-mortar one.

We’ve seen this before. Developers didn’t just build websites. They helped erase entire professions. While we were busy centering divs and arguing about tabs vs spaces somewhere a print shop went quiet because a website went live. Somewhere a designer who spent 20 years mastering physical layouts watched a teenager drag and drop pixels on a screen and call it “good enough.” Somewhere, a journalist saw their work replaced by a blog written in a bedroom at 2 AM. And the cool kids didn’t stop. They didn’t pause and ask, “What about their craft?” When you first opened Adobe PageMaker or wrote your ‘Hello World’ for the web, you were already a destroyer of old worlds. You didn’t slow down because someone else felt threatened.

The “cool kids” back then:  moving fast, breaking things, not respecting the rules. The ones who didn’t understand the depth of the old professions, but replaced them anyway. They were building the future of the Internet, but they were quietly burning down someone else’s present. Now we’re on the other side of that feeling. That moment when you realize the thing you spent years mastering… might not matter in the same way anymore.

The kids using AI today will not care about how we handcrafted code in Vi or notepad++. They won’t care about our tools, our process, our pride in doing things “the right way.”

The business won’t care either.

The kids will build fast, break things, fix things, ignore rules, create new rules. They’ll be told they’re not “real programmers”. Just like some web devs were. They won’t stop. They will start as vibe coders and eventually if they are curious they will need to look what is under the hood. Just like some of us did.

I imagine the job market has already changed

If you’re not using AI, I think you are falling behind. Honestly to me it feels like the new computer. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s already useful. I would not have said that 6 months ago. It probably doesn’t even write 60% of your code, but when it does it’s the borring one. Last week it created around 2 days of working code in minutes. Boring work, with a lot of code. My boss will consider me a fool if I don’t take advantage of it and use it for such tasks. The least I should do is be able to recognise when I need to use it and when not. For now this is no different then recognising when to use a screw-driver and when to use a wrench. To me the shift happened suddenly. Six months ago AI tools were frustrating and unreliable. Some wow moments and a lot of irritation in between. Now it’s like flipping a switch in a dark room – suddenly everything changed, and you’re still adjusting your eyes. Personally for me this big leap happened in Oct/Nov 2025. Using AI in end of 2025 is nothing compared to using it in March 2026. This is my feeling. It changed so fast. You can choose not to use it – that’s valid. But it’s still a choice to step out of the game. It might help you with borring repettetive tasks, but it’s better to forget about them and move forward. Running AI in the console is the game-changer, suddenly you have a few agents helping you with tasks.

The Good News

Yes, we’re all doomed. No good news. Maybe it’s just a bubble we need to live through, but it will filter out the noise, much like the dot-com bubble did.

Ok, the good news is that AI is hard – It’s not just typing a prompt and getting magic in the browser. You need to learn how to use it well. You need practice and judgment. While doing that, something interesting happens: you start to see what you’re actually good at. AI doesn’t magically make you great – it makes your strengths more obvious. You’ll learn when it helps and when it doesn’t. You’ll be thankful it takes care of the boring tasks: you don’t need to spend time to spin up a docker on local if the AI can do it for you in seconds. You don’t need to create yet another table that will iterate and show data. You’ll still need to understand what you’re doing – at least for now. I think sometimes you’ll feel that old excitement again. Like when you built your first webpage. When something finally worked and you thought “this is actually cool”.

The Second Good News

Again, no good news but It can be fun from time to time. There’s a weird “Hello World” feeling again. That small rush when something works and surprises you. The same energy people had when working with tools that were once considered jokes. Yes – PHP and JavaScript. So yes, maybe we are going downhill. But the world didn’t end with the internet. And it probably won’t end with AI in the next few years. When you start using it, you’ll see where you’re better than the new kids on the block and you’ll gain an edge – at least for a while.

Curiosity still wins. The same curiosity that built the web will shape whatever comes next.