On the flip side, in a project that is largely in O&M, a developer who can easily regression-test legacy systems and keep the plethora of documentation updated is worth their weight in gold.

Of course, because of “all the new things”—like hearing stories of rapidly developing startups using AI, robotics, quantum computing, etc.—we tend to mentally associate the pathological coder as the one with the highest merit. But if you can write really good code that does not adhere to requirements, is not testable, or is not documented, it loses value outside of prototyping phases.


Ok—enough software talk (for now).

There is something to be said about the forgotten aspects of our work. They are not forgotten because they are less important but because people are hyper-focused on other things. Ironically, this is the reason their importance heightens.

Some sports analogies: Defense wins championships, but a good defensive lineman’s highlight reels garner fewer views than that wide receiver who never seems to even make the playoffs. It’s called the trenches for a reason. It’s not pretty, but if you talk to a defensive coordinator, it’s where everything starts—it is the foundation of a good defense.

So if you’re now convinced that there is at least some merit to these undesirable parts of work, how can we learn to take pride in them? How can I be proud to be proficient at the things no one else seems to care about?

This might seem defeating at first because you are absolutely correct—no one is going to go out of their way to praise you for this work. Hell, it might go completely unnoticed for a period of time too. This boils down to a pretty simple philosophy in actuality:

Ask yourself: Am I good at what I do, and how do I truly feel about my answer to that question?

If you believe you are good at what you do, how often do you obsess over the details and the little things? By my own definition of “good,” I would consider things like tests and documentation just as important as code itself. Can you be an effective developer at all points of a project’s lifecycle? Are you only useful during certain phases? Are you OK with that?

What is preventing me from being the best at what I do? How can I close this gap as soon as possible?

This, of course, requires some amount of self-awareness and humility—the same kind of humility it takes to approach the most undesirable tasks with pride and find joy in the process of mastering them.

Speaking of, it has never been easier to master something in such a short amount of time, so don’t let silly excuses like “I don’t know how” stop you from performing at the level you consider acceptable for your own standards. If you are reading this, within seconds, you can be learning anything. You are only at most 2–3 weeks away from becoming extremely proficient in any topic of your choosing.

I will be writing more about this in the next blog post, but the access you have to information, research, and literature is profound and novel from a historical perspective—so take full advantage of it. Soak up every second of suffering through writing that unit test today, because the edge and humility it creates are exactly what will make you better tomorrow.

The Factorial Future

For most of human history, the human species has been the dominant life form on the planet. What I mean by dominance is that our efficacy of refining matter around us into technology is many orders of magnitude higher than the next closest species on the planet. Through the use of our hands and minds, we have created buildings, cities, societies, and an entire civilization that represents our collective effort. People from all walks of life, from everywhere around the world, have developed better technology through the years, and it all culminates in the Modern Era we know today. This way of life, as we know it, is now coming to an end—but it's not entirely a bad thing.

We have been developing computer-based technology long enough now to have trends and patterns. One such pattern that you may have heard of or be familiar with is the concept of technology roughly doubling every year. TVs are a fantastic example: for every year, they either get double the resolution, half the price, double the features, or some combination thereof. An extremely important distinction for those not aware is that this represents exponential growth—imagine starting with one dollar and doubling it each day for a month. By day thirty, you'd have over a billion dollars. However, what's even more remarkable is that this rate of change—which many find overwhelming—may actually be slow compared to what's coming.

If you've been keeping up, already in 2025, we have seen one incredible advancement after another in AI systems, each one seemingly more transformative than the last. If you are also familiar with the traditional pattern of technology doubling every year, you will notice that something about AI seems... different. Your intuition is correct, because AI is the first of a new category of technology which does not grow and improve exponentially, but rather at one order higher: factorial growth. To understand factorial growth, imagine instead of doubling each day, you multiply by the day number itself—by day five, you're multiplying by five, by day ten, you're multiplying by ten, and by day thirty, the numbers are growing at a rate that shatters the mind.

I could write for quite a while on why this is the case, but for now you will have to trust me. The objective of this post is not to prove AI advances at a higher order than all the other technology you are familiar with, I am confident this is the case. Rather, the purpose of this post is to let you know and warn you: The way of life you are familiar with is being phased out. Not in 100 years. Not in 50. Not 25. Within the decade.

What sort of precise impacts it will have is a hot topic of debate amongst technologists, futurists, economists, and others. While many people agree that AI will replace jobs, the more crucial questions of how fast and to what extent are often overlooked—yet these factors can be quantified with precision. My personal prediction, based on analyzing current technological trajectories and historical patterns of technological displacement, is that 50% of all current jobs held by humans will be replaced or displaced by AI by the end of 2027. I came to this specific date by examining the convergence of several key factors: the rate of AI model improvement, the pace of adoption, and the threshold at which AI becomes more cost-effective than human labor. Even if I am wrong, the margin of error is not more than 2 years.

I also don't want this post to come off as fearmongering, or trying to encourage you to do anything different than whatever you have been doing; life goes on. In fact, I think as we push closer to the end of this decade, we will begin to see the incredibly positive benefits of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) too. ASI is currently in a phase similar to a baby synthetic virus in a petri dish—it exists in controlled environments, showing remarkable potential for growth and adaptation, but remains contained within research parameters. It has the potential to grow very rapidly, but its actual existence is known by only the few researchers who get to work with it every day.

When ASI transitions from this controlled environment to the real world, the same world that you and I have come to love, it will quickly adapt to us being a large part of that world, except we will no longer hold that aforementioned dominance over the world. This does not necessarily make us a slave class, but it does mean the way of life that your entire bloodline has ever known will be no more. This transformation, while profound, opens new doors for humanity—Humans will have more time to focus on more human things, whatever that means to you—spiritual journeys, philosophical journeys, creative journeys. These pursuits are core to our being and can never be stripped from us. So here's a goodbye to the way things were, and a "Hello, World" to that new world waiting for us on the other side of this singularity.