Training your replacement

Chris has always been good at pointing out what those of us choose not to see.

I’m amazed at how many developers are gleefully, enthusiastically training their own replacement.

And…

AI code can be generated fast, producing short-term gains with massive long-term costs.

Code you don’t understand is a liability. It’s code you can’t test. It’s code you can’t touch. It’s code that can blow up on you in unanticipated ways.

If you’ve been a developer for a while, you’ve almost certainly run into parts of a large code base that no one will touch because the developer who wrote it left the company years ago and no one still working there knows what it does.

And this…

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

I didn’t properly learn React until January 2025, because I needed it for a client project. I used it for six months. I haven’t touched it since.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.