13 years in, AI nearly left me behind. So I stopped fighting it and started building.
I've been writing code for thirteen years. I mention that not to flex, but because it's exactly why the last couple of years rattled me.
When AI coding tools started getting genuinely good, I felt something I hadn't felt since I was a junior: behind. Thirteen years of hard-won instinct, and suddenly a chatbot could scaffold in thirty seconds what used to take me an afternoon. You tell yourself it's hype. Then you watch a feature ship in a day that would've taken a week, and the floor shifts a little under you.
So I did what a lot of us did. I started dabbling.
The dabbling phase
