How AI will obliterate your career in 18 months (and why you should let it)

If you're anything like me, you think "learning AI" is a cope.

Because most engineers are approaching the AI revolution in the completely wrong way. They're either panic-learning prompt engineering because some influencer told them to, or they're doubling down on "fundamentals" and pretending Cursor AI isn't writing production code faster than their senior developers. Both groups are fucked. But for different reasons.

If you're one of these people, I'm not here to talk down on you (though I will be harsh). I've chased 10x more tech trends than I've actually mastered. Microservices, GraphQL. The whole Web3 rabbit hole. I think that should be the case for most engineers, you can't know what works until you know what doesn't. But the fact that engineers are about to get replaced not by AI, but by engineers who understand how to use AI? That's not a trend. That's gravity. However, as much as I think "upskilling on AI" is missing the point, it's always wise to reflect on the career you hate so you can launch yourself toward something much better.

So wether you want to build the company, escape the FAANG grind, or stop being a code monkey for a PM who can't tell Redux from a Redis cache, I want to share 7 ideas you probably haven't heard before on identity, leverage, and survival in the age of infinite code generation.

This will be comprehensive.

This isn't one of those posts you skim and forget.

This is something you'll want to bookmark, take notes on, and actually execute on over the next week.

The protocol at the end ( to dig deep into why you become and engineer and what you actually want to build) will take about a full day to complete, with effects that last far longer than your last sprint cycle.

Let's begin.

1 - You aren't building what you want because you aren't the engineer who would build it

When it comes to surviving the AI revolution, engineers focus on one of two strategies:

Learning new skills (least important, second order)
Becoming a different type of person (most important, first order)

Most engineers panic-learn the least framework, hype themselves up to "ship daily" for two weeks, then fall back into Jira tickets, Github issues, Linear tickets (whatever) and stand-ups without realizing they were trying to build a great career on a rotting foundation.

If this doesn't make sense, let's run through an example.

Think of somebody successful in tech. It can be a founder who sold their company for $100M, a staff engineer at Stripe who ships features that print money, or an indie hacker pulling $50K/month from a SaaS they built in 3 months.

Do you think the founder has to "grind" to build features? Does the staff engineer have to discipline themselves to write clean code or communicate well on stand ups? To you, it might seem like that on the surface, but the truth is they can't see themselves living any other way. The founder has to grind to NOT ship. The staff engineer feels physical discomfort looking at poorly architected systems.

To some people, my lifestyle seems extreme. I've been coding for ~15 years, corporate, startups, personal projects, crypto and so on. To me, it's natural. When my wife tells me I should "take a break from coding", I hold my tongue from saying "If I weren't having fun, why would I be doing this?".

This next sentence may sound simple, but it's baffling how many engineers don't get it: If you want a specific outcome in your career, you must adopt the identity that creates that outcome long before you reach it. If someone says they want to "become a senior engineer", I often don't believe them. Not because they're incapable, but because that same person says, "I can't wait until I'm senior engineer so I can stop studying documentation". I hate to break it to you, but if you don't adopt the habits that made you senior, systems thinking, code review discipline, architectural taste, publish at least one lib on open source, you'll plateau and waste years wondering why you're stuck at mid-level.

When you truly changed your identity, all of your habits that don't move the needle toward your goal become disgusting, because you have a deep and profound awareness of what kind of career those actions compound into. You're okay with your current career because you're not fully aware of what your daily actions are leading to.

You say you want to escape 9-5 and build your own thing. But your actions show otherwise. And it goes deeper than you think.

2 - You aren't building what you want because you don't actually want to build it

"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement." – Alfred Adler

If you want to change who you are as an engineer, you must understand how the mind works so you can reprogram it.

The first step is understanding that all behavior is goal-oriented. It's teleogical. When you think about it, this is obvious, but when we dig into it, most people don't want to hear it.

You open VSCode because you want to ship something. You scroll social media because you want to avoid anxiety of shipping.

Those are clear. But most of the time, your goals are unconscious. You may not realize that when you refactor code for the third time instead of launching, you're trying to protect yourself from the judgement that comes from putting something real into the world.

On an even more unconscious level, you pursue goals that actively harm you, but you justify them in ways that are socially acceptable:

If you can't stop bikeshedding in code reviews, you may justify it as "caring about code quality," but in reality, you're trying to feel intellectually superior without the risk of building something yourself.
If you say you want to leave your current job but stay without any real reason, you may think you "lack courage," but the truth is you're pursuing the goal of safety, predictability, and not looking like a failure to other engineers who see your current one as the ultimate achievement.

The lesson here: real change requires changing your goals.

I don't mean setting some surface-level OKR. I mean changing your point of view. Because a goal is a projection into the future that acts as a lens of perception, it allows you to notice information, ideas, and opportunities that help you achieve it.

If your goal is "get promoted to senior", you'll notice political moves and resume-padding projects. If your goal is "building something people pay for", you'll notice market gaps and customer pain.

Different lenses. Different lives.

3 - You aren't building what you want because you're afraid to be that engineer

"If you have accepted an idea—from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, tech Twitter—and you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject." – Maxwell Maltz

Here's how you become the engineer you are today, and how you'll become the engineer you'll be tomorrow. This is the anatomy of engineering identity: 1 - You want to achieve a goal (get hired, get promoted, build a product) 2 - You perceive reality through the lens of that goal 3 - You only notice "important" information that allows you to achieve it (learning React, Rust, whatever) 4 - You act toward that goal and receive feedback 5 - You repeat that behavior until it becomes automatic (you "become" a React developer) 6 - That behavior becomes part of who you think you are ("I'm a frontend engineer") 7 - You defend your identity to maintain psychological consistency 8 - Your identity shapes new goals, restarting the cycle

The unfortunate reality is you must break the cycle between steps 6 and 7. But this process starts when you're young. You wanted to survive. Your parents taught you that "good grades → good college → good job → good life." Unless you break that pattern, you're still chasing their definition of success.

And your parents? They were conditioned by the Industrial Age belief that specialization = security. "Pick a lane. Become an expert. Retire at 65."

That worked when companies had 40-year lifespans. Now the average is 15 years. Your "safe" job is getting automated by an intern with Claude Code. To take it deeper: once your physical survival is handled (which it is—you're reading this on a $1000 phone), you start surviving on the conceptual level. You protect and reproduce your identity. When your body is threatened, you fight or flee. When your identity is threatened, the same thing happens. If you identify as "a Python developer," you'll feel threatened when someone suggests Rust is better. You'll feel stress. You'll defend Python in ways that have nothing to do with technical merit. If you were raised in a "FAANG or bust" culture and didn't think for yourself, you'll attack indie hackers as "not real engineers." The same happens when you unconsciously see yourself as "the senior who's seen it all" or "the guy who knows Kubernetes." You will sabotage your own growth to protect that identity.

4 - The career you want exists at a specific level of engineering consciousness

Engineers evolve through predictable stages over time. Most people crystalize at one level and never leave. I've synthesized this from models like Dreyfus (skill acquisition), Kegan (adult development), and my own 15 years observing engineers. Here's the 9 stages of engineering identity:

Tutorial Hell – You can't separate learning from doing. Every project needs a guide.
Survival Mode – You learn to protect yourself. Copy-paste from Stack Overflow. Hide your imposter syndrome.
Team Player – You are your team's stack. "We're a React shop" feels like objective reality.
Self-Aware Coder – You notice you have opinions that don't match the team. You wonder if microservices are actually necessary, but don't say it out loud yet.
Principled Engineer – You build your own system of beliefs. You can defend your architectural choices. You believe the right patterns yield the right results.
Pragmatist – You realize your "principles" were shaped by the jobs you've had. You hold them more loosely. You start saying "it depends."
Systems Thinker – You see code as part of larger systems (business, team, incentives). You know your own biases but can't fully escape them.
Meta-Engineer – You see all frameworks, including "good code," as useful fictions. You know the map is not the territory. You watch yourself play "senior engineer" with gentle amusement.
Builder – There's no separation between work and creation. You don't "go to work." You just build. Coding, sleeping, thinking—it's all the same flow. Most engineers reading this are between stages 3-7. That's a huge range. If you're at 3-4, you're desperate for change but can't make sense of it yet. If you're at 6-8, you're reading this to either learn something or kill time productively. The good news? Moving through any stage follows a pattern.

5 - Intelligence is the ability to build what you want

"The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life." – Naval Ravikant

There's a formula for career success:

Agency (ability to act)
Opportunity (market/timing)
Intelligence (ability to iterate and learn)

If you have agency but no opportunity, you're a genius building the wrong thing. If you have opportunity but no intelligence, you'll never capitalize on it.

First, let's talk intelligence in the context of engineering. For that, we look to cybernetics—the art of steering toward a goal.

A cybernetic system has these properties:

A goal
Action toward that goal
Sensing where you are
Comparing current state to goal
Acting again based on feedback

You can judge intelligence by the system's ability to iterate and persist.

A ship blown off course that corrects. A compiler that catches errors and suggests fixes. An engineer who ships, gets feedback, and ships again.

Low-intelligence engineers get stuck on problems and quit. They hit a bug and blame the framework. They fail to get users and assume "the market isn't ready."

High-intelligence engineers realize any problem can be solved on a large enough timescale. There's a sequence of choices that leads to the outcome you want.

When I say "goals," I'm not talking about JIRA tickets.

I'm talking about teleology—the idea that everything serves a purpose. Goals determine how you see the world. For most engineers, those goals were assigned:

"Get the FAANG job"
"Hit senior by 30"
"Don't rock the boat"

A known path that doesn't work anymore.

To become more intelligent as an engineer:

Reject the known path (FAANG → senior → retirement)
Dive into the unknown (build in public, ship fast, fail often)
Set new, higher goals to expand your mind
Embrace chaos and allow for growth
Study the principles (not just the syntax)
Become a deep generalist (AI rewards breadth + depth, not just depth)

This isn't the traditional definition of intelligence. But this sequence creates the neural connections that separate great engineers from mediocre ones.

6 - How to launch into a completely new engineering career

The best periods of my career came after getting absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making. How do you dig into your mind? How do you become aware of your conditioning? How do you reach insights that change the trajectory of your career?

Through questioning. Something so few engineers do. You can tell by how they talk about tech—parroting takes, defending frameworks they've never shipped with. I want to give you a protocol you can use every year to reset your career and launch into a season of intense growth.

This will require one full day to complete. Pen, paper, and an open mind. When I observe engineers who successfully flip their identity, it happens fast after a buildup of tension. There are 3 phases:

Dissonance – They feel like they don't belong in their current role and get fed up.
Uncertainty – They don't know what's next. They experiment or spiral.
Discovery – They find what they want to build and make 6 years of progress in 6 months. Our goal: help you reach dissonance, navigate uncertainty, and discover what you actually want to build.

Part 1) Morning – Career Excavation – Vision & Anti-Vision

Set aside 15-30 minutes to answer these questions. Do NOT use AI. Break past the limiter on your mind.

Dissonance Questions:

What is the dull, persistent frustration you've learned to live with in your career? Not burnout—what you've learned to tolerate.
What do you complain about repeatedly but never actually change? Write down your top 3 career complaints from the past year.
For each complaint: If someone only watched your behavior (not your words), what would they conclude you actually want?
What truth about your current job would be unbearable to admit to an engineer you deeply respect?

Anti-Vision (The Career You're Avoiding):

If nothing changes for 5 years, describe an average Tuesday. Where do you wake up? What does your calendar look like? What code are you writing? How do you feel at 5pm?
Now 10 years. What opportunities closed? What projects died? What do former colleagues say about you when you're not in the Slack?
End of your life. You played it safe. Never built your thing. What was the cost? What did you never let yourself create?
Who in your life is already living the future you just described? Someone 5, 10, 20 years ahead on the same path. How do you feel about becoming them?
What identity would you have to give up to actually change? ("I am a [language] engineer", "I am the guy who knows [framework]")
What's the most embarrassing reason you haven't changed? The one that makes you sound weak, not reasonable?
If your current behavior is self-protection, what are you protecting? And what is it costing you?

If you answered truthfully, you should feel disgust for how you're spending your engineering career. Now we orient that energy in a positive direction.

Minimum Viable Vision:

Forget practicality. Snap your fingers, 3 years from now—what does an average Tuesday look like? Same detail as question 5.
What would you have to believe about yourself for that life to feel natural? "I am the type of engineer who..."
What's one thing you'd do this week if you were already that engineer?

Part 2) Throughout The Day – Breaking Autopilot

Set random reminders with these questions:

11:00am: What am I avoiding by doing what I'm doing right now?
1:30pm: If someone filmed my last 2 hours, what would they conclude I want from my career?
3:15pm: Am I moving toward the career I hate or the career I want?
5:00pm: What's the most important thing I'm pretending isn't important?
7:30pm: What did I do today to protect my identity rather than grow?
9:00pm: When did I feel most alive today? Most dead?

During walks/commutes, contemplate:

What would change if I stopped needing people to see me as "the senior engineer"?
Where am I trading aliveness for safety?
What's the smallest version of the engineer I want to become that I could be tomorrow?

Part 3) Evening – Synthesis

After today, answer:

What feels most true about why you've been stuck?
What is the actual enemy? Not your manager. Not the tech stack. The internal pattern running the show.
Write one sentence that captures what you refuse to let your career become. This is your compressed anti-vision.
Write one sentence that captures what you're building toward. Your vision MVP.

Create Goals (Lenses, Not Deadlines):

One-year lens: What would have to be true in one year to know you broke the old pattern?
One-month lens: What project or skill would make the one-year lens possible?
Daily lens: What are 2-3 actions you can timeblock tomorrow that the engineer you're becoming would simply do?

7 - Turn Your Career Into A Game

"The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness." – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

You now have all the components. Let's organize them:

The 6 Components of Career-as-Game:

Anti-Vision – The career I refuse to live
Vision – The ideal I'm building toward
1-Year Goal – The mission
1-Month Project – The boss fight (what you're shipping)
Daily Levers – The quests (priority tasks)
Constraints – The rules (what you won't sacrifice)

Why this works: Games create obsession. They have clear feedback loops, progression systems, and stakes. Your vision is how you win. Your anti-vision is what happens if you lose. Your 1-year goal is the mission. Your 1-month project is the boss fight. Your daily levers are the quests. Your constraints are the rules that force creativity. These act as concentric circles—a forcefield around your mind that guards against distractions. The more you play, the stronger the force becomes. Soon it becomes who you are. And you wouldn't have it any other way.

The engineers who survive the AI revolution won't be the ones who learn prompt engineering. They'll be the ones who rebuilt their identity from the ground up. Start tomorrow.

– Antonio