I'm Terrified of Becoming a Tech Relic

I was walking my dog this morning, half-listening to a podcast about AI tools, and I got this sudden uncomfortable flash of the early 2000s.

The “old guys” at my first company. Smart people. Genuinely capable, decades of real experience. But somewhere along the way they just stopped. Struggled with email. Couldn’t make the switch to word processors. You could watch the world move past them in real time. Even as a new grad, there was something unsettling about it. Like they’d become ghosts in their own offices.

I don’t want to be that guy.

It’s a weird thing to admit. I build with AI every day. Tools for work, personal projects. I enjoy it. But there’s self-preservation in there too, if I’m honest.

I’m not a doomer about any of this. I don’t think the sky is falling. But I use this stuff daily, and I can see where it goes. The gap between people who use these tools and people and waiting to see how things play out is growing faster than the paper-to-PC shift ever did.

stop talking about ai. start building with it

I’ll keep learning because I like it. But I keep thinking about those faces from twenty years ago. Getting replaced doesn’t always come with a pink slip. Sometimes it’s just that everyone else in the room is speaking a language you stopped learning.