A Message To Devs At The Frontier | JackCamerano.com

 Hero image for: A Message To Devs At The Frontier Lately, I’ve noticed something about the way coders speak. Away from conferences, far removed from LinkedIn’s carefully curated optimism. I mean in the silent corners: the half jokes in Slack, the DMs, the Telegram groups, the little pauses mid sentence when someone realises what they’re implying. A year ago, AI was a party trick. Soon after it became a shortcut. Now it’s part of the expected workflow. It writes code. It reviews code. It explains code. It drafts documentation. It generates tests. It spits out prototypes in minutes. Even if you personally don’t use it, your teammates do. Your company does. Your competitors definitely do. Something has shifted because of that and it’s not just technical: the ground under our work feels different. When people talk about this shift, they often reach for job security first because that’s the obvious fear and the easiest one to admit out loud. But the strongest feeling I keep running into isn’t “will I be employed”. It’s something deeper, something closer to loss. We’re not scared, we’re grieving. ## When “What You Do” Becomes Part of Your Identity Fear is about outcomes: rent, layoffs, budgets. Fear is “will I still be employed in six months”. Grief is the feeling you get when something you loved is changing shape in your hands, while everyone around you keeps insisting it’s “just a tool” and you should “adapt”. It’s the kind of loss that’s hard to explain because nothing has technically been taken away… yet you still feel lighter in the wrong places. The reason it hits so hard is painfully simple: we live in an incredibly specialised society and a big chunk of our identity is welded to what we do. Ask someone what they do and watch how quickly it turns into who they are. If you’re a dev, the work leaks into everything. When you enjoy building systems, you don’t experience it as a set of tasks. You experience it as a way you move through the world. So when AI starts chipping away at pieces of that craft, the first punch isn’t “oh no, my job”, it’s “if the machine can do that, what does that make me?” It makes us human. Quite annoying, I know. ## Everything Changes, Nothing Changes I’m an incurable optimist about change and progress. Not because I think everything will be fine but because history has a reliable rhythm: everything changes, nothing changes (or, as I prefer in my dialect, cambia tuto e no cambia gnente). Everything changes because the tool moves the boundary of what’s possible. Nothing changes because humans keep doing what we always do when that boundary moves: complain, experiment, argue, copy, learn, mess up. Then we proceed to shape a new normal that would’ve looked like science fiction to the previous generation. The printing press didn’t just create books: it detonated knowledge, sparked moral panic and eventually made literacy ordinary instead of elite. Electricity didn’t just give us light: it rewired labour, cities, sleep and our baseline expectation of comfort. The internet didn’t just connect us: it collapsed distance, democratised knowledge and made truth… weirdly complicated. AI is in that family. It’s not “another framework”. It’s a multiplier: a shift in what a person can do with a keyboard and an idea. So yes, it’s going to touch everyone. Developers first, because of course it’s developers first. ## The Carriage Driver Problem A metaphor that’s been bouncing around my head lately is the advent of cars. If you were a horse-drawn carriage driver, the first automobiles probably looked like a novelty. Loud, unreliable, expensive toys for rich weirdos. A curiosity, not a threat. Then manufacturing improves and the price drops. Ford shows up and a whole industrial world rearranges itself around a new default. If you were a carriage driver you didn’t just lose a job. You watched an entire ecosystem of skills, instincts, pride and social value stop being the default. But the intent didn’t vanish. People still needed to get from A to B: they still needed logistics and someone to keep the whole messy operation working. The why stayed. The how mutated. A lot of those drivers didn’t disappear. They adapted: they let go of what they’d earned the hard way while learning new muscles. They stopped reading horses and started learning engines. Same purpose, different tools. You’re allowed to feel conflicted about it. Some days you’ll want to lean in, other days you’ll want to throw your laptop into the sea. Both reactions make sense. Bear one important thing in mind though: adaptation isn’t passive. It’s a choice. ## The Frontier When I say “frontier”, I’m not pointing at some distant future. I mean right now, while the ground is moving. I mean this awkward present, where the tools are suddenly powerful and the rules haven’t caught up. There’s a lot of confident storytelling right now. Underneath it, we’re guessing more than we admit. What we do know is how it lands: through the defaults we ship. Developers aren’t just being changed by AI. We’re the ones wiring it in. We decide what gets automated, what gets reviewed, what gets logged, what gets a human in the loop, what gets waved through because “the model said it’s fine”. You don’t need to predict exactly where this goes to influence where it lands. The new shape of the craft is going to be negotiated in code review, one small decision at a time. The frontier isn’t a place: it’s the repository you cloned this morning. ## The First Spark When I’m trying not to spiral about all this, I keep going back to the first time I felt real curiosity about computers. For me it was creating a calculator in BASIC V2 on my dad’s Commodore 64. The kind of thing that feels hilariously trivial, like being proud you successfully boiled water. But at the time it felt like magic. I remember the moment the machine did what I told it to do, not because it was “smart” but because it was obedient in a precise way. I remember using Logo and drawing a square for the first time, just a square, but it existed because I made the turtle (ehr, triangle and a lot of imagination) move. That feeling is the root of why I’m here. Not status, not job security, not “I chose a good career”. Just this: I can make a system do something. I can build. If you’re reading this, you probably have your own version. The first time you made a website, the first script that saved you hours, the first moment you understood networks well enough to feel like you could see the invisible. Dig for that memory. Not for nostalgia but for orientation: it will remind you what part of you is still yours regardless of what tools show up. ## Hope as a Discipline I don’t think hope is something you “have” or “don’t have”. I think hope is a discipline. Hope is choosing to participate even when your ego is bruised. And hope is letting yourself be a beginner again, which is humiliating for people who built an identity around being good at hard things. Developers are particularly bad at this: we treat not knowing as a bug. Hope, for me, is choosing curiosity on purpose, especially on the days I don’t feel it. Letting grief sit in the passenger seat but keeping my hands on the wheel. Because AI can erode parts of what we do. It can make output cheap and blur what skill looks like, but some things don’t become irrelevant just because the tooling gets “louder”. Taste still matters. Judgement still matters. Responsibility still matters. When things break at 3am, it’s still on humans to decide what “fixed” means. And the core of the job, whatever form it takes, is still taking messy intent and turning it into behaviour you can rely on. AI can generate. It can assist. It can surprise you. It can’t own. ## Where does that leave us? So yes, change is coming. In many ways it’s already here. It’ll touch devs, designers, writers, artists and everyone who currently believes their craft is uniquely protected by the universe. We’re allowed to grieve. But after grief, you get a choice. You can turn away and calcify, clinging to the old ways as if familiarity were virtue. Or you can stay curious, remember what brought you here and keep building. We’re still at the frontier. Not in a heroic sense: in the messy sense where the map is half blank and the explorers are improvising, me most definitely included. There is one upside, though: the people who show up early get a say in what becomes normal. So show up. Grieve what’s being lost then keep your hands on the wheel. ### Want to chat? I'm not a big fan of commenting systems but you're welcome to reach out to me via email or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.