Engineering

Someone at work drew this maturity curve on a whiteboard a few months back: gated, assisted, parallel, supervised, AI-native. Cute framing. I laughed at “AI-native” because it sounded like a LinkedIn post. Then I actually looked at where I sit on it and stopped laughing. Parallel. Third box from the left. I’ve been sitting there since maybe June. What Parallel actually feels like # Nobody warns you that “parallel” mostly means more browser tabs. Right now I’ve got six worktrees open — feat/rate-limit, fix/flaky-webhook-test, four others I’d have to alt-tab to name — each running its own agent, each waiting on me for something. My job title didn’t change but the job did. I used to produce the diff. Now I referee five diffs I didn’t write and one I’m too tired to remember starting.

Every year a new framework launches with the promise of solving the fundamental problems of software development. Every year engineers adopt it with enthusiasm. Every year the same problems resurface, just in a new form. The appeal of new # New technology is exciting because it represents possibility. Before you’ve built anything real with a new tool, you can project onto it all the things you wish your current stack could do. The ergonomics feel better because you haven’t hit the edges yet.