what a time to be a midwit dev

AI is, quite honestly, the best thing that’s ever happened to those of us who arrived late to the craft.

I’m self-taught. I started with Harvard’s CS50, enjoyed it enough to convince myself that I could do this for real, so I quit my job at the height of covid to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With YouTube and Udemy, I was able to build out a bunch of projects and eventually land a role as a software developer.

I was a developer by name, but never really felt like one, I didn’t take the conventional route or work at a fancy company, the typical heuristics we use to indicate who’s actually good.

I was good at what I did, but it always felt like I was playing catch-up, even when I probably wasn’t. I was very comfortable with the tools I used, take React for example, in the same way most people are (no one really knows how to use effects), but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you how it really worked, the kind of old-age wisdom that you develop after spending years in a tsx file. I knew that principals and tech-leads have accumulated their skills over time, but that’s time that I’ve already missed out on when I was running experiments as a laboratory technician.

So I compensated.

I knew there would be better developers and engineers than myself, who could tell you the innards of how any system worked or code in binary for fun, so the only thing I could do was lean on the edge that I might have over them, effort. I built projects before interviews, cloned their product, built out features that they might like. There was a permanent chip on my shoulder, knowing that what I lacked in time spent in IDEs and terminals could be made up for in a lot of hard work and curiosity - otherwise I’d be cooked.

Then AI happened and all of a sudden the whole landscape changed.

The kind of deep, narrow expertise that once dominated the industry is no longer a leverage, it’s being rapidly democratised. The edge that folks once had, through the slow, deliberate honing of their craft over decades, the thing that separated folks in the industry, has narrowed. Granted, coding agents aren’t great at everything, but it’s only a matter of time - it was just a year ago when we were laughing at how bad coding agents were, and now even the greatest disbelievers like DHH have seen what they’re really capable of.

For someone who feels like they came into this late and has been trying to compensate since, mate. what a time to be alive.

And because I never really felt like an engineer, I don’t feel like I’m losing a part of my identity by delegating writing code to agents. There’s absolutely nothing to grieve.

This is the age of the great generalists, those who have strange and almost incoherent backgrounds who are curious, hardworking, and can understand a problem, they’re the ones who really do have the world at their feet - and there’s no turning back. I imagine it’s those who’ve spent decades slowly-honing their craft that will have the hardest time adjusting, if they don’t change with the tide.

But for the rest of us, the unseasoned midwits, it’s our time to shine.