I have not been “AI pilled” yet. (Also, what a stupid term.)

While AI has become deeply integrated into my workflow, and I genuinely love having agents run things for me in the background while I focus on other things, I wouldn’t say I’ve had some red pill moment where “I see the truth now” and AI became an essential and daily thing…

You see, my morning routine when I start work is the same: I open my terminal of choice (Warp), and I open my IDE of choice (whichever JetBrains one is applicable). And then if the task deems it, I’ll open Junie or Claude inside my IDE.

Why? Is it nostalgia? Holding on to the past 30+ years of habits? Ignoring the hype and falling behind?

Nope. It’s simple.

I find that AI agents are good at two things:

  • Super simple tasks they can handle faster than me (fix this bug, bootstrap this project, write this test, optimize this function)
  • Super complex tasks they can do faster than me (do this research, collate these reports, investigate this repo)

For everything in the middle? I’m still quicker and better. And there I still prefer my old tools.

The nuanced architectural decisions. The context-aware refactoring. The “this feels off” intuition that catches problems before they become incidents. The debugging session where you need to hold six different pieces of state in your head simultaneously.

That middle ground is still firmly human territory.

So why am I posting this?

Because social media is full of posts about how the industry is changing, how AI is replacing developers, how we’re all going to be out of jobs by next Tuesday. You see it too. And I see you posting it. Oh yeah. You know who you are.

But me? I’m increasingly falling into the camp of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Because until the AI can do things unprompted, and really think and act by itself, I’m still here every day:

  • Writing software
  • Improving processes
  • Automating tasks
  • Scaling infrastructure
  • Telling people that meeting could have been an email

Same shit, different day.

Just with a few more helpful bots in the background.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn. And while social media was a big trigger, it also came from reflecting on this podcast about Casey Muratori Doesn’t Care About AI, where the host kept talking about AI pilled in a way that sounded more like a forced suppository than a choice.