I'm losing my developer edge, the AI is coming up from behind
Inspired by the ever-changing world of software engineering and LCD Soundystem.
Yeah, I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up with AI.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the devs with Cursor and Claude.
But I was there.
I was there in 2008.
I was there with plugins in Notepad++.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the devs whose keystrokes I hear when they get on the livestream.
I’m losing my edge to the new model seekers, who can name every researcher of every AI company from 1962 to 2008.
I’m losing my edge.
To all the kids in Y Combinator and Techstars.
I’m losing my edge to the CS-school Brooklynites in gilet jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Haskell.
But I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
I can hear the keystrokes every night at the desks.
But I was there.
I was there in 1984 at the first Cobol practices in a meetup in Silicon Valley.
I was working on the CLI shortcuts with much patience.
I was there when Guido van Rossum wrote his first interpreter.
I told him, “Don’t do open-source. You’ll never make a dime.”
I was there.
I was the first guy porting Doom to the Kodak Camera.
I played it at E3.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.
I used to work in the Linux team.
I merged everything before anyone.
I was there in the Java virtual machine with James Gosling.
I was there in Xerox park during the IP stealing.
I woke up programming on the bench in Bletchley in 1948.
But I’m losing my edge to better-coding people with better ideas and more AI.
And they’re actually really, really nice.
I’m losing my edge.
I heard you have a compilation of every good source code ever done by anybody. Every great Stack Overflow answer by Jon Skeet. All the underground repositories. All the Kevin Mitnick hacks. I heard you have a hard drive of every zero-day exploit on the dark web. I heard that you have a white hat from every seminal hacker club — 1985, ’86, ’87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good Linux distro and another bootable DOS set from the ‘80s.
I hear you’re downloading Cursor and using Claude and are throwing your dependency tree out the window because you want to make something vibey. You want to make something with prompts.
I hear that you and your meetup have uninstalled Cursor and installed Windsurf.
I hear that you and your meetup uninstalled Windsurf and installed Cursor.
I hear every algorithm that you know is more efficient than every algorithm that I know.
But have you seen my code? Documented, responsive, fast, clean, functional, beautiful, pixel-perfect, memory-efficient, memory-safe, un-crashable, un-hackable, un-injectable, compatible, clear, crash-free, open-source, forkable, maintainable, stable, reliable, logable, legacy-free, debt-free, edge-case-free, timeout-free, accessible, stateful, robust, linted, readable...
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
You don’t know what you really code.
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