You want to know what I give up using GenAI?
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. The quiet satisfaction of typing every line myself. I've given up all chance at inner peace with myself. I've made my workflow a funless place. I share my pull requests with ghosts of developers who swore they'd never prompt an LLM. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote twenty five years ago teaching students to build the web by hand, from which there is only one conclusion — I'm damned for what I do now.
My anger at the hype. My ego when I know what I'm doing. My unwillingness to yield to those who say the craft is dead. My eagerness to fight the ones who say the craft doesn't need to change. They've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a defender of real software engineering without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude from either side. Because the middle is where no one claps for you. The middle is where you just build things.
What is my sacrifice?
I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. Every lazy take about AI replacing developers, every breathless LinkedIn post about "10x devs," every Reddit thread claiming vibe coding means we don't need to understand what we're building — I fight that nonsense with the very thing they're talking about. I burn my credibility with one crowd to build something real for another. I burn my purity as a traditionalist to make a sunrise that the next generation of builders might actually see.
Because here is the truth they won't tell you on either side: the people screaming that AI is going to destroy software engineering and the people screaming that AI means you never have to learn anything again are both wrong. The real work — the actual rebellion — is in the middle. It's using these tools with intention. With craft. With an understanding of what the machine is doing and why you're directing it. It's the vibe of the dark side.
The gatekeepers on both sides want you passive. The AI doomers want you paralyzed with fear. The AI hypebeasts want you dependent on a prompt box. I refuse both. I use the tool. I understand the tool. I teach others to do the same. And if that means the traditionalists call me a sellout and the disruptors call me a dinosaur, then fine.
So what do I sacrifice?
Everything!!!