Hey friends,
As the year winds down, I’ve been doing some quiet inventory.
Not resolutions.
Not predictions.
Just trying to make sense of what actually changed this year—and what that means for people like us who’ve been in the workforce long enough to remember more than one “once-in-a-lifetime” disruption.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to:
AI isn’t just changing tools.
It’s changing what “being useful” even means.
For most of our careers, value looked like execution:
Getting things done
Shipping the work
Moving the widget from A to B
Knowing the system better than the next person
That model worked for a long time.
But we’ve quietly crossed a line where execution is getting cheap. Really cheap.
Copilots write.
No-code tools build.
Automation handles the middle.
“Best practices” are a prompt away.
Which forces an uncomfortable question:
If my value is moving widgets from A to B, AI will replace me.
If my value is understanding which widgets matter, why, and when, I still have work to do.
That distinction matters more now than it ever has.
A familiar pattern (we’ve seen this movie before)
I grew up around people who lost factory jobs when manufacturing moved overseas.
Back then, muscle was automated or outsourced.
Now it’s procedural thinking.
Different tools.
Same human response.
When pressure rises, people cling to what feels solid:
Titles
Roles
Certifications
“The right way” to do things
Not because they’re bad people—because uncertainty makes all of us defensive.
The reframe that’s helping me
The second half of that sentence is where humans still matter:
Judgment
Context
Sensemaking
Tradeoffs
Seeing second-order effects
Saying no when everything looks possible
AI can assist this work.
It can’t take responsibility for it.
I’m not writing this from a place of certainty
I don’t have this figured out.
Job security feels thinner than it used to.
The pace of change is real.
And anyone telling you they’re completely unfazed is probably lying—to you or themselves.
But I am convinced of this:
The people who thrive next won’t be the ones who defend old roles the hardest.
They’ll be the ones who redefine their contribution the fastest.
That’s what I’m trying to do right now—in my work, my writing, and the things I choose to build next.
If you want the longer version
I wrote a year-end essay that digs deeper into this—through the lens of Agile, AI, and value—but it’s really about something bigger than any framework.
No hype.
No calls to action.
Just a pause.
As always, thanks for reading—and for sticking with me through another weird year in tech.
More soon,
Joe