I remember when coding interviews happened at a whiteboard, no computer, no internet, just a marker and whatever you could hold in your head. When AI tools arrived, using one in an interview was the red flag. Now the red flag is the candidate who doesn't use AI enough. In about two years, the same tool went from forbidden to expected.
And it only gets faster. Every few months another wave rolls in, a model out of some lab, a tool that does something it couldn't last year, and it resets what counts as normal. You ride it, or you let it break over you. Plenty of people imagine a third option, waiting on the beach with their arms crossed until the water goes calm, but the water never goes calm, and it was never going to wait for them.
all in
I've decided to ride it, in the most literal way I have. All of my code is written by AI now (is it mine at this point?), and somewhere along the way I stopped treating that as a threat to be managed and started treating it as leverage to be spent. I know the engineers who went the other way, who made a personality out of dismissing the tools, and the tools got better anyway while they just fell further behind.
Going all in wasn't one decision; it's one I make again every few weeks. A better model ships, and I rebuild a working agent on top of it instead of staying on the old version, because the result comes out better and cheaper. Relying on older models would have been easier, and most people do. Riding means doing that over and over, long after the novelty wears off.
