This post was originally published on the main website on May 14 2026. I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community. Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends. Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day. I forgor about my dev account <3!
Hey everyone 👋,
It is fascinating how a single job interview question can encapsulate the defining neurosis of an entire industry. For months, I have been watching the engineering world collectively panic over a new filter masquerading as a baseline requirement: if you aren't actively building artificial general intelligence, why exactly are you here? While my piece Just Don't Pick Up the Brush explored the isolation of holding deep technical competence in a market that no longer knows how to classify it, and Technology Has Destroyed My Livelihood examined the systemic devaluation of foundational engineering, this essay zeroes in on the bizarre metric that sits at the intersection of both. The current start-up discourse, propelled heavily by venture capital narratives, has conflated AGI affiliation with fundamental technical worth. I am writing this to systematically dismantle that conflation. Answering the question requires naming some uncomfortable truths about what we are actually building verses what we are selling, but continuing to let the wrong metrics drive our careers is an error we cannot afford to sustain.
