As a father of 4 children who’s married, I haven’t had time in years to pursue any of my software hobbies. The nights playing with arch Linux, fussing with half built oss projects - I can’t justify the time anymore but I still Enjoy them. The cloud and Kubernetes came along, I told my wife this was something I had to learn and throw myself at. Despite spending tons of family time instead in my lab in my basement and trying to push those techs at work - I got my butt handed to me - felt like a young man’s game for every interview I went to.

At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to serve it - and my family dynamic was only “slightly interrupted” (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go through the news or social media. Amazing! I’m still throwing myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family time.

At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs - toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can’t replace my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org shifts, but not for a few years.

The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it’s when I’m asked - how do we get more features out the door?

* More headcount? Not unless they’re rockstars - more tokens.

* offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more tokens.

* fly by night software startup xyz? No I’ll just write my own fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.

* consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.

* oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud provider abc - no sweat, we’ll make it work on our cloud provider for $8.

Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I worry about them. Unless you’re die hard, I’d just assume do the work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.

For those of you just starting out - I don’t have a great answer for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.

For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier - get your feet wet - we’re about to go for a hell of a ride. If you stick to the “took ur derbs” and want to keep treating your craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we’ll need those but don’t expect to survive on that