My father in law lost his job 2 years ago, completely unrelated to AI, at the age of 63. He had worked this same job since he was 18 and it was his identity. He'd almost greet people with "Hey I'm CEO, my friends and family call me X".
Being fired from his own company completely destroyed him - and not because he's worried about the financial aspect, he doesn't need to worry about that at this point.
I remember watching him go though this and thinking to myself "Jeeze, I'm glad my identity isn't completely tied up with what I do for work".
With AI knocking on the door I'm surprised how much my identity and perceived self-worth is actually tied to being a "good" developer. But it's more of a slow burner than what my father in law got. So I at least have some time to mentally prepare for my new reality.
Makes you wonder with some of the dinosaurs in office if a big reason why they cling on is that internal mythmaking. Presumably everyone knows they can just up and kick back by some body of water doing whatever they'd like with their time, should they ever want to step down. And yet they don't. They prefer their busy, stressful, life of importance.
Me personally I'm just not wired like that. I work hard only to get to that payoff of being lazy and carefree later. I don't actually like being in this stressful state. It bewilders me frankly that some seemingly are addicted to it. Maybe they literally are, considering flight or flight response is a real measured altering of neurotransmitters.
The core of what we were doing (Writing code) dictated the core of our tool kit (IDE).
Now that we're not writing code anymore it's very exciting to see how this unfolds in the tool kit.
Before you bury me for that "Not writing code anymore" statement my current workflow is literally just talking to Claude via Wispr Flow (mic) whether it's describing what we need to implement or reviewing what Claude Code implemented.
> The core of what we were doing (Writing code) dictated the core of our tool kit (IDE).
>
> Now that we're not writing code anymore it's very exciting to see how this unfolds in the tool kit.
So maybe the text area in your IDE becomes read-only. Even when not actively debugging, you still need to read code and efficiently browse through it as you review it. Because you always review code, don't you? Don't you??
Hook Hero is a live mission control for all your Claude Code sessions — showing you at a glance which agents are running, how many sessions you've had today, time spent per project, cost per session, message counts (interactive vs CLI), tool usage, and the real-time status of every active
and completed run.
Being fired from his own company completely destroyed him - and not because he's worried about the financial aspect, he doesn't need to worry about that at this point.
I remember watching him go though this and thinking to myself "Jeeze, I'm glad my identity isn't completely tied up with what I do for work".
With AI knocking on the door I'm surprised how much my identity and perceived self-worth is actually tied to being a "good" developer. But it's more of a slow burner than what my father in law got. So I at least have some time to mentally prepare for my new reality.