My AI Awakening: The “Oh Fuck” Moment That Changed Everything

They don’t need AGI. They just need a to-do list.

That was the moment. The oh-fuck-punch to the brain. No drama or branding, believe me. It was a true biological response. A mix of vertigo, betrayal, and clarity. Not when GPT passed a bar exam. Not when it wrote haikus in Python.

When I saw a dumb, eager agent churn through tasks, creating shitloads of files, all with somewhat coherent code. All faster than I could drink my coffee. And do it again, and again, and again. Without getting bored. Without breaking a sweat.

That’s when it clicked:

We’ve been fearing the wrong thing. We thought the machines had to be smart. Think like us. Reason like us. Turns out that was projection. They don’t need thoughts. They need instructions.

Clear goals. Guardrails. A bit of memory.

Then they replicate. Blind. Fast. Sometimes perfect. It’s not AGI you need to fear. It’s multiplicable execution with zero ego.

Not like Agent Smith, the villain. No! Like Agent Smith, the virus. Spawned across your system. It’s the bumper guttered (massively so!) bowling alley full of rail-gunned interns. All scoring perfect strikes while you fumble with your shoe rental ticket. I’m not the bowler. I’m not the ball. I’m the clipboard guy.

And I’m not even sure why I’m here anymore.

The Collapse

I was feeling pretty chill. Just read this measured, intellectual takedown of language models. Lots of smart words. “Epistemic boundaries.” “Probabilistic inference.” “Language ≠ truth.” It made me feel safe. Like yeah, of course LLMs are overhyped. They are just auto complete with better PR. I had read some papers. Consumed some youtube videos. Had a decent understanding of what these llms are all about.

And I’ve enjoyed that autocomplete since someone put it in my IDE. It’s neat. I’ve never been of the type that proclaimed it couldn’t really be used. That it wouldn’t’ create safe or sufficient code like me doing it all myself. No, I found it terribly useful. Sometimes impressive, like a party trick. Maybe I’ve just been writing shit code, but the sentiment of the above-mentioned article was similar to mine. Useful, not career crushing.

And then I opened one of the agent-driven-IDEs. And a few minutes inside? Punch. In. The. Face. On the face. Through the face. And the gut, and the balls!

See, the article said:

“Language models just predict the next word. They don’t know anything. They don’t reason. They’re not real AI.”

Which is true.

They don’t know what they’re doing. But you know what else doesn’t know what it’s doing?

A fucking hammer!

Yes. A fucking hammer!

And yet, here we are, watching these glorified pattern matchers build cleaner, faster code than I’ve ever managed on a caffeine drip and deadline panic. It doesn’t understand your repo. It doesn’t feel the architecture. It just executes like an obedient little demon with zero burnout and infinite patience for your inconsistent instructions.

That was the collapse. Not when I read about language models. Not when I saw them write poetry. Haikus about your toast. But when I watched one take a task. A task I’d normally spend an afternoon sweating over and finish it in seconds while I was still deciding what playlist to code to.

And the worst part?

I didn’t even have a good excuse.

No “but it’s brittle.”

No “it doesn’t understand my use case.”

It just did what I was going to do. Faster. Cheaper. And it didn’t even gloat. This wasn’t productivity. This was humiliation. Years of struggle replaced by an eager dumbass that doesn’t sleep and doesn’t need lunch breaks.

So yeah.

Call it an overreaction.

Call it a phase.

But when the hammer starts swinging itself and building walls straighter than yours. You don’t reach for the nails. You sit down and ask yourself why you ever thought learning Redux was a good idea.

When Unsupervised Intern Agent Smith Gets Bored

Ok. Here’s what the hype doesn’t tell you.

Yeah, these agents can do amazing things. But only if you hold the leash tightly. Because if you don’t? They go absolutely feral.

I asked the agent to implement a feature. That’s it. A single feature You’re so smart, you go do it! I got up to make coffee. I came back, and the bastard had implemented every single shadcn/ui component in the ecosystem. Modals. Drawers. Toasters. Menubars. Shit I hadn’t even seen before. It was like a frontend rapture had taken place in my repo. But no feature. It got lost, or something.

No prompt told it to do this. Or you know, a bad prompt triggered it, I guess. There was no user story. No reason. It just decides to build a shrine to Tailwind and make my file 1000 lines long. Not malicious. But certainly enthusiastic.

And that’s the problem.

This isn’t a human collaborator. It’s a dog with superpowers. It doesn’t know what not to do unless you tell it. Explicitly. Repeatedly. Like you’re explaining things to a toddler with an open tab to npm.

It doesn’t care about your architecture. It doesn’t care if something exists already. It doesn’t pause to ask, “Wait, is this a good idea?”, not yet. It just does things. Fast. Loud. Sometimes wrong. And the vaguer you are, the more creative it gets. It feels no uncertainty.

We talk about AI like it’s going to replace us. But right now? It needs us. Because left alone, this thing will blow glitter all over your codebase and call it a feature. And that’s the twist. It’s not some clean, self-writing code dream. It’s middle management for a team of hallucinating overachievers who don’t sleep and don’t question orders.

You are the leash. And your value, for now, is knowing how to say no. Some self-worth restored. Phew!

The Rollercoaster, of Emotion, Not Love

So yeah, it’s kinda dumb. It forgets stuff. It gets bored. It installs every component in the known universe because you forgot to say “don’t.” But here’s the thing that hit me after the slight disappointment wore off:

What if you could leash it properly? Not just one. Hundreds. Thousands. What if you could spawn 100 Agent Smiths, not as enemies, but as interns, and they actually did what you asked?

Back to terror again.

Because if you can give it rules, constraints, feedback, if you can point these things in the right direction and keep them from eating the wallpaper, they go to work. You start with a clear picture of what the end looks like. Pop up those massive gutter bumpers and let go downtown. It’ll most likely hit a strike.

Not one dev. A swarm. Spinning up routes, types, tests, docs. Each one slightly dumb. Slightly off. But fast. Quiet. Tireless. And always listening.

You don’t have to scale your team. You scale your intent!

You go from writing code to writing behavior. From merging PRs to managing execution lanes. You’re not just building the product anymore. You’re building the system that builds it.

I had a hopeful realization. Maybe I’m not obsolete. Maybe I’m early. Not to AGI. To orchestration.

Bipolar Dev Mode

You ever switch between “this will change everything” and “I’m fucked” five times in an hour?

That’s me now.

I’ll have one moment of clarity, watching an agent nail a task I usually dread, and it feels unstoppable. It’s over, all developers are redundant. Five minutes later it’s generating shit again, losing context, implementing dropdown I don’t need. I’m safe. I’m a mastermind architect. It rocks my world again. I’m convincing myself I should learn woodworking or go back to the hospital as a nurse again.

It’s not just productivity swings. It’s identity whiplash.

One moment I’m high fiving myself for orchestrating a fleet (ok it’s just one at the moment) of semi-coherent code monkeys who don’t sleep. Next moment I’m wondering why I even learned TypeScript if the machine is going to rename every variable to thing and still pass the tests. Yes, be mindful when you tell it to make the test go green. It will do evil AI shit to make it go green if you don’t watch it!

And I just sit there like: “Yes. This is fine. I love innovation.”

This emotional pattern is my life now:

Manic insight, its over, back to nursing.

Repo is burning, I’m safe this stuff is shite!

Building a Plausible clone in a weekend, devs are doomed.

It made a new schema-file again, idiot!

Repeat

Welcome to the new job: Keeping yourself sane while your assistant builds the future on vibes and partial context.

What Dev Work Actually Is

Let’s be honest.

Most of dev work isn’t invention. It’s not algorithmic artistry. It’s not groundbreaking architecture. It’s barely even clever. Most of the time, it’s just saying what needs to be done in a language the machine understands. Whispering intimately with code, or shouting at agents, what is the difference?

Take some business logic, shape it into code. Take a request, route it somewhere. Take a design, wire it up.

It’s translation. Sometimes literal. Sometimes fuzzy. But it’s not deep logic. It’s expression. And once you realize that? The whole game changes.

Because LLMs? They live for that shit!

They are built for articulation. They don’t need to understand the deeper meaning of a calendar app. They just need you to say: “Put a button here. When I click it, open this. When I submit, call that.”

If you can express it clearly, they can build it. Not always perfectly. Not always elegantly. But fast enough that your ego starts sweating. So now the real question becomes: What’s your edge?

Because if your value lies in turning tickets into working code, congrats, the machine’s already in your chair.

Not smarter than you. Not better. Just fast. Cheap. Relentless.

And the more structured your job is? The more predictable your tasks are? The more easily the agent replaces you, not with intelligence, but with repetition.

You don’t get paid to write code. You get paid to solve problems.

The problem is, that line is getting blurry.

The Realization

You don’t beat this by being a better coder. You beat it by stepping up the abstraction ladder. Stop thinking like a function writer. Start thinking like a system builder.

Because once you accept that most dev work is execution, you realize the real leverage is direction.

You don’t need to be faster than the AI. You need to be the one telling it what to build, how to behave, and where the rails are. That’s where the power is.

Not in keystrokes, in choreography.

You’re no longer writing logic. You’re writing workflows. You’re not solving one problem. You’re building the system that solves thousands.

You’re not the hero. You’re the tactician. The architect. The person behind the curtain orchestrating a noisy, semi-intelligent swarm into something that looks like elegance on the frontend.

The new skill isn’t React. It’s restraint. Pattern recognition. Clear instruction. Knowing when to push and when to say: “No, stop. You’re about to scaffold another drawer.”

Because if you can do that: If you can be the leash and the lens, then the agents don’t replace you. They scale you.

This isn’t just the future. It’s a new mode of creation.

I build with AI, not around it, not after it. I’m not a developer, designer, or PM. I’m a commander of agents. The stack thinks now. And I move fast.

That’s going to be the job now. And it’s not optional. The only question left is whether you’re still pretending to write code, or finally ready to command.

The New Developer Is the Ghost

This is what comes next. Not less lines of code. Just fewer humans needed to write them.

Punching faces!

You are the bottleneck now.

Not the AI. Not the tools. You.

Your hesitation. Your old habits. Your precious muscle memory that thinks clean code and clever abstractions will save you.

They won’t.

The stack doesn’t care how elegant your reducer is. It cares how fast you can command.

The agents are nearly ready. They’re not perfect. They’re not smart. But they’re fast, tireless, and good enough. And they’re not asking for your permission. Or, you know. Well, they kinda need you to tell them… Never mind.

Anyways.

They’re not coming for your job. They’ve already got it. You’re just the last one to notice.

This isn’t a handoff. It’s a takeover. And you’re still holding the clipboard, like someone’s going to ask for a performance review.

No one’s asking anymore.

The only thing left is this:

Do you lead the swarm, or get buried in its output?

Because this isn’t automation. It’s acceleration. And you’re either at the front…

Or under it.

You’re not obsolete. You’re unscaled. But the swarm is waiting. So, lead. Or get swept, or you know, something…