Standing as a senior engineer in the age of AI

I am 44. Whether that makes me a senior engineer, I will set aside for now. Still, the gap I have seen between juniors, mid-level folks, and seniors was not only knowledge. It was also a kind of implementation stamina — how long, and how densely, you could keep your hands moving. That was where the difference showed.

AI coding has flattened much of that. Work that used to stall at the walls of a language or a platform now moves forward with surprising speed. Each environment still has its quirks, of course. Even so, the seniority gap that used to show up as raw speed of implementation no longer counts the way it did.

Varied field experience still piles up. Sometimes it is the inefficient stuff you picked up inside a death march. At the same time, stamina falls, and productivity declines a little. That was the usual curve of an engineering life. That gap has thinned, and it feels as if an engineering career has been given extra years. Well. At least it went in a good direction.

Implementation difficulty is no longer the main problem. That does not mean you should just build everything, stubbornly. The higher vantage is knowing you can get there without building. Do not make things just because you can. Complex things break easily. Experience still lives in that judgment, and I think that is a strength now.

The walls of languages and platforms have fallen far enough that an idea is almost enough to start. From here, I feel like making all kinds of things.

How to spend this extra stretch of an engineering life is still ahead of me.