Most of that article is just good career advice in general, so I'll just comment on the part about AI.
One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>.
I don’t really think this is a problem. AI is a tool, you still learn while using it. If you actually read, debug and maintain the produced code, which I consider a must for complex production systems, it’s not really that different compared to reading documentation and using Stack Overflow (i.e., coding the way it was done 10 years ago). It’s just much more efficient and it makes problems easier to miss. Standard practices of AI assisted development are slowly forming and I expect them to improve over time.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
Very much the opposite. LLMs do a fantastic job of increasing accessibility of knowledge.
They have wide exposure to content and is incredibly good at spotting patterns and suggesting both well established norms from the current domain and serendipitous cross domain concepts.
I feel the concern you share is LLMs expose new frontiers to people who otherwise might not even have imagined that frontier exists and then those people do a lazy or superficial job of it because they lack any internal motivation to do a deep dive on it
It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.
Then spend less time on screens when you're not working. The post says "Go to meetups and events. Offer help. Offer introductions. Learn to be a connector." These are all outside of work activities. Also, these don't have to be tech events. They can be anything, just unplug, get out there, and meet people.
Telling someone they need to learn to be an extrovert to get ahead in a field that people tend to gravitate towards because they are introverts is psychologically quite unsound advice, because personality is quite fixed. I've beaten myself up over my not-get-ahead-able personality enough when I was at college, and have, paradoxically, gotten ahead quite a bit better than the people I knew back then, who did have those model extrovert personalities.
The second reason why I take issue with that line is, as I've said, the fact that few employers allow employees time "on the clock" to do anything at all that's away from screens, and saying "do it in your spare time, then" is adding insult to injury. I have a rich social life, hobbies, and am raising a family. What I'm observing is that this is not helping my career one bit, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything in life needs to be in service of one's career. But this is also the reason, why I do not have time, off the clock, to attend meetups and events.
The third thing I would notice is that it helps your career (again, speaking from a "code monkey" perspective here), less than you'd think. What is going to come out of the chance encounters at meetups and events? Maybe someone wants to hire you. Maybe someone wants to work with you more informally. If you sell your time in 40-hour-per-week blocks, none of this is a business opportunity you can capitalize on. If you're on a job, you've already sold your 40-hour-block, and have nothing left to transact with. If you're off a job, you need a new one, and you need it now, so you need to be more transactionally-minded than just investing time into chance encounters.
Now, there is a separate consideration that may enter into career planning, namely that one might try to evade the 40-hour-per-week payrolled-employee trap, and try to prioritize maximizing hourly rate over yearly compensation and do freelancing. But this sort of consideration, in my mind, is not properly the domain of career advice. Career advice is: "Here is some mistakes you should avoid. Avoiding them is always an option, no matter what your circumstances are, and by avoiding them, you will always have better outcomes." This is not that: It is simply not the case, that everyone can and should be a freelancer.
I am not intrinsically opposed AI. I am opposed to its environmental and social impacts.
I constantly see spamming AI bots that send zillions of useless or poor-quality PRs to OSS.
I see PRs that add features, but are really huge, making maintenance even harder in the future without the help of AI. AI creates bloatware everywhere.
I see AI trained on stolen data without respecting licenses.
I see data centers popping up at a scale never seen, consuming more and more energy. more and more resources (They basically consumed all RAM/SSD of 2026).
"It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies." [0]
I am tired of people that have no concerns about climate change or the impact of their collective actions on other humans.
I hope that one day everyone will be judged for their role in this system.
I promise you I spent more energy air conditioning my house this month than the collective energy of all my prompts over the past year to date while refinaries are being blown up in multiple countries right now. It's a silly argument. The hardware coming out now is 10x faster while using the same amount of energy as a regular desktop while I'm gaming. I legit can't take this "please think of the environment" argument seriously. The math ain't mathing.
Spend more time away from the screen and meet real people - Coincidentally, this is a use case that I'm about to task OpenClaw with. I'm going to make a personal social events coordinator of sorts where I give it my interests, tell it where it can find local events related to those interests, then let it suggest them as they come up and add them to my calendar. Then I can just show up and do the fun stuff and automate the boring part of finding things to do.
With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level.
With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.
It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.
Most of that article is just good career advice in general, so I'll just comment on the part about AI.
One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>.
I don’t really think this is a problem. AI is a tool, you still learn while using it. If you actually read, debug and maintain the produced code, which I consider a must for complex production systems, it’s not really that different compared to reading documentation and using Stack Overflow (i.e., coding the way it was done 10 years ago). It’s just much more efficient and it makes problems easier to miss. Standard practices of AI assisted development are slowly forming and I expect them to improve over time.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.
Very much the opposite. LLMs do a fantastic job of increasing accessibility of knowledge.
They have wide exposure to content and is incredibly good at spotting patterns and suggesting both well established norms from the current domain and serendipitous cross domain concepts.
I feel the concern you share is LLMs expose new frontiers to people who otherwise might not even have imagined that frontier exists and then those people do a lazy or superficial job of it because they lack any internal motivation to do a deep dive on it
It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.
Then spend less time on screens when you're not working. The post says "Go to meetups and events. Offer help. Offer introductions. Learn to be a connector." These are all outside of work activities. Also, these don't have to be tech events. They can be anything, just unplug, get out there, and meet people.
Telling someone they need to learn to be an extrovert to get ahead in a field that people tend to gravitate towards because they are introverts is psychologically quite unsound advice, because personality is quite fixed. I've beaten myself up over my not-get-ahead-able personality enough when I was at college, and have, paradoxically, gotten ahead quite a bit better than the people I knew back then, who did have those model extrovert personalities.
The second reason why I take issue with that line is, as I've said, the fact that few employers allow employees time "on the clock" to do anything at all that's away from screens, and saying "do it in your spare time, then" is adding insult to injury. I have a rich social life, hobbies, and am raising a family. What I'm observing is that this is not helping my career one bit, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything in life needs to be in service of one's career. But this is also the reason, why I do not have time, off the clock, to attend meetups and events.
The third thing I would notice is that it helps your career (again, speaking from a "code monkey" perspective here), less than you'd think. What is going to come out of the chance encounters at meetups and events? Maybe someone wants to hire you. Maybe someone wants to work with you more informally. If you sell your time in 40-hour-per-week blocks, none of this is a business opportunity you can capitalize on. If you're on a job, you've already sold your 40-hour-block, and have nothing left to transact with. If you're off a job, you need a new one, and you need it now, so you need to be more transactionally-minded than just investing time into chance encounters.
Now, there is a separate consideration that may enter into career planning, namely that one might try to evade the 40-hour-per-week payrolled-employee trap, and try to prioritize maximizing hourly rate over yearly compensation and do freelancing. But this sort of consideration, in my mind, is not properly the domain of career advice. Career advice is: "Here is some mistakes you should avoid. Avoiding them is always an option, no matter what your circumstances are, and by avoiding them, you will always have better outcomes." This is not that: It is simply not the case, that everyone can and should be a freelancer.
"If you resist AI, it helps to ask why"
I am not intrinsically opposed AI. I am opposed to its environmental and social impacts. I constantly see spamming AI bots that send zillions of useless or poor-quality PRs to OSS. I see PRs that add features, but are really huge, making maintenance even harder in the future without the help of AI. AI creates bloatware everywhere. I see AI trained on stolen data without respecting licenses. I see data centers popping up at a scale never seen, consuming more and more energy. more and more resources (They basically consumed all RAM/SSD of 2026).
"It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies." [0]
I am tired of people that have no concerns about climate change or the impact of their collective actions on other humans. I hope that one day everyone will be judged for their role in this system.
[0] https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.ht...
I promise you I spent more energy air conditioning my house this month than the collective energy of all my prompts over the past year to date while refinaries are being blown up in multiple countries right now. It's a silly argument. The hardware coming out now is 10x faster while using the same amount of energy as a regular desktop while I'm gaming. I legit can't take this "please think of the environment" argument seriously. The math ain't mathing.
Spend more time away from the screen and meet real people - Coincidentally, this is a use case that I'm about to task OpenClaw with. I'm going to make a personal social events coordinator of sorts where I give it my interests, tell it where it can find local events related to those interests, then let it suggest them as they come up and add them to my calendar. Then I can just show up and do the fun stuff and automate the boring part of finding things to do.
With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level.
With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.
It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.