Reflecting on AI as an Engineer

Something feels missing.

I still write code. I still ship features. I still hit deadlines.
But the joy , the curiosity that pulled me into engineering is fading.

In the past four years, I’ve moved through three AI-focused companies: first, building an AI note-taker for meetings, then an AI search engine, and now an AI-based education counselor. I’ve seen first-hand how AI can supercharge productivity… and how it can quietly strip away the craft.

From Learning for Joy to Building for Speed

I wrote my first line of Python at 19. Back then, everything was an adventure—joining ML competitions, exploring data science, tinkering just to understand why something worked. I wasn’t coding to ship features; I was coding to learn.

Fast forward to today. With Codex, GPT-5, and countless AI tools, what once took weeks now takes days. That’s incredible—almost intoxicating—but also unsettling.

Because speed changes the work.

When Productivity Becomes the Only Goal

The more AI sped up our workflow, the more expectations shifted. Productivity became the measure of value. Features had to be shipped faster. Products had to be delivered sooner.

Somewhere in that rush, I stopped exploring. I stopped reading documentation just to understand it. I stopped chasing concepts out of pure curiosity. The joy of writing code, line by line, and grasping the reasoning behind it was replaced with “get it done now.”

And the lower the barrier to building, the more the industry feels like a race to the bottom , where once-simple, hard-earned skills quickly become commoditized.

The Loss That Hurts the Most

The conversation about AI and jobs usually focuses on livelihoods lost. That’s real, and it matters. But there’s another loss that’s harder to measure: the loss of identity as an engineer.

When your craft becomes just another output to optimize, when the creative thinking about how to build something is replaced by AI suggestions and productivity metrics , you stop seeing your work as your art.

And that, for me, is the deepest loss.

The Ironic Time Trap

Ironically, this “ever-increasing productivity” hasn’t freed up time. It’s done the opposite. I find myself trying to do things faster and faster, yet always feeling behind. AI handles tasks, generates code, runs agents—but the expectations keep scaling with the tools. More output. More features. More, more, more.

The Question We Need to Ask

I’m not anti AI. I use it every day to refine text, write code, automate tedious work. But I worry that if we only measure ourselves by productivity, we risk hollowing out the soul of our craft.

The question we should be asking is:
If productivity is the only goal, what happens to curiosity? To creativity? To the joy of building something by hand?

Because if we lose that, we might still be building—but we won’t be creating.