I feel this way too. Wish I could fully understand the 'why'. I know all of the usual arguments, but nothing seems to fully capture it for me - maybe it' all of them, maybe it's simply the pace of change and having to adapt quicker than we're comfortable with. Anyway best of luck from someone who understands this sentiment.

I felt this way from a year ago up until February 2026. Claude Code and Codex becoming the norm cemented for me that a lot of the projects people are working on (including mine) are totally obsolete. As far as I'm concerned, most code is now abstracted away, and people only want better agents - not traditional software products, except as infrastructure or platforms.

It also looks like the final form of the AI roll-out: whatever the model or application, this is the era of agents, and probably in the near-future mostly automated agents. We'll see an overflow of bespoke automation and in-house agents doing everything from personal task management to enterprise business processes, so releasing a "Personal Fitness Tracker" or a "CRO Auditor" in 2026 doesn't make any sense.

All of my anxiety around it has evaporated because I can see what it actually is: an ouroboros of AI output generating automation of more AI output. What most software engineers will be working on now is guiding that output, making it easier to inspect/configure it, optimizing it, and improving the consumer and developer experience.

Otherwise, we just have to drop our old concepts for projects and work on something else.

For the consumer the floor is rising, and for the experienced developer the ceiling is rising. I personally hate web dev anyway, and I'm glad I can work on interesting engineering problems (even with the help of an AI) instead of having to manually stitch together yet another REST API, or website, or service pipeline.

Why? Good anxiety or bad?