Veteran developer asks: are years of intellectual skill-building suddenly worthless?
sushixsx · reddit · 2026-11-12
A longtime software developer shares an existential anxiety on Reddit: after spending 6 years and thousands of hours building a complex personal project from scratch, watching AI's rapid progress makes him question the value of hard-won intellectual skills.
His core argument: for most of history, mastering a skill over years gave you an edge others couldn't replicate — but when anyone can access roughly the same capabilities by asking an AI, the gap between a decade of mastery and simply describing what you want collapses. He preemptively dismisses "just learn to use AI": the barrier is drastically lower than mastering a field, which is exactly the problem.
He asks the community whether building a career around intellectual expertise is being turned upside down — and what we should even work toward anymore. The post resonates as a candid window into developer anxiety about AI-era skill devaluation.
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