"AI will replace software developers by 2027." If part of you opened that article, read it, and felt something deeply shift in your stomach, this is for you.
You spent years building your identity around being someone who builds things. Someone who solves hard problems. Someone who makes other people's lives better with what you create. And now there's this thing that can write code, generate art, draft architecture, compose music.
So the question surfaces, at 2am, in the shower, even mid-standup: what does that make me?
Imagine the following for a moment.
Somewhere right now, a surgeon is in an operating room. Their hands are steady. Their focus is absolute. They are doing something that most human beings on the planet cannot do, reaching inside another human body and changing the course of that person's life.
Hero stuff.
But look closer. Look at what's in their hands. The instruments. The monitors. The imaging systems. The software that told them exactly where to operate.
Who built that?
Somewhere right now, a pilot is bringing a 500,000-pound aircraft through turbulence at 35,000 feet. Their passengers are sleeping, reading, arguing with their kids about screen time. They have no idea how close to magic this moment is.
Who built the avionics? Who wrote the flight management software? Who designed the composite materials in those wings?
Somewhere right now, a teacher in a rural village has access to the entire accumulated knowledge of human civilization. A small business owner just competed with a Fortune 500 company. A musician just heard their song played back with a full orchestral arrangement they couldn't have afforded ten years ago.
None of this used to be part of our reality. Who made it possible?
We did.
The builders. The engineers. The developers. The artists. The people who stay up late making things work so that everyone else wakes up to a world that works.
If you've ever played an RPG, you know the support class.
The Paladin. The Paragon. The Guardian.
They don't top the kill list. They don't make the highlight reel. And that's OK. Since every experienced player knows the truth:
Without the support class, your squad wipes, the raid fails and the dragons win.
Engineers, developers, artists, that's us. Civilization's support class. The ones who make everyone else's story possible.
The pattern the doomer headlines keep missing
There is a pattern the doomer headlines actually keep missing: every major technological disruption in history has the same shape.
New tool appears. Workers feel existential dread. Builders build the new infrastructure. The ones who lean in become the new foundation of civilization.
Gutenberg's press. The Industrial Revolution. The internet.
We are at step three right now.
AI isn't happening to us. We are happening to AI.
A Paladin doesn't fear a new spell.
They equip it. They master it. They use it for the benefit of the full group.
We may not be heroes, but we empower them. It is our responsibility to make them as great as they bloody ever can be. I believe that matters.
The original LinkedIn post included a short video, "This is the way." In part 2 of this series, The Paladin Equips a New Spell, I put this exact principle into practice and build something to solve my own problem.