Software, in a Time of Fear

The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being reproduced here with the author’s permission.

This 2,800-word essay (a 12-minute read) is about how to survive inside the AI revolution in software development, without succumbing to the fear that swirls around all of us. It explains some lessons I learned hiking up difficult mountain trails that are useful for wrestling with the coding agents. They apply to all knowledge workers, I think.

Up front, here are the lessons:

• Stop listening to people who are afraid.
• Seek first-hand testimony, not opinions.
• Go with someone much more enthusiastic than you.
• Do not look down.
• You must get different equipment.
• Put the summit out of your mind.

Yet I hope you stay for the hike up.

The photo above was taken high up on a mountain. It’s a very long drop down to the right. If you fell off the path in a few places, you’d almost certainly die.

Would you like to walk along it?

Most would say: No way.

But what if I told you that while this photo is quite real, it is misleading. It isn’t some deserted place. It is in America’s busiest national park. The railings and bars on that trail are incredibly strong, even when they are strangely bent around corners. Thousands of people walk along that path every year, including children and older folks. The fatality rate is approximately one death every 30 years.

In fact, my 13-year-old son and I did that climb—which is called Precipice Trail—last summer. We saw other people up there, including a family with kids. It was an incredible adventure. And the views are stunning.

Yes, it was a strenuous climb, and was certainly scary in some places. Even though I had done a lot of other hard trails, I was extremely nervous. If my fearless son wasn’t with me, I’d never have done it.

When we got to the top, out of habit, I told my son, “I am proud of you for accomplishing this.” He rolled his eyes and said, “I am proud of you.” He was right. I was the one at risk. (That did hurt a little bit.)

Yet I learned some things about fear from hiking the hardest trails in Acadia, which I’d never have imagined myself doing a few years ago.

As a lifelong software developer confronted by these extraordinary coding agents, I believe the future of our profession is atop an intimidating mountain whose summit is engulfed in clouds. Nobody knows how long the ascent is, or what lies at the top, though many people are confidently proclaiming we will not make it there. We are told only the agents will be at the summit, and we should therefore be afraid for our livelihoods.

I have far less confidence that the agents will put us all out of work. Though I don’t see all of us making it up that mountain, I intend to be one of them.

Still, there is so very much fear in our field. It is so…unfamiliar! It swirls around every gathering of technologists. I was at a conference last year where the slogan was the very-comforting “human in the loop.” Yet a coworker of mine noticed, “A lot of the talks seem to be about taking the human out of the loop.” Indeed. And I know for a fact that some great developers are quietly yet diligently working on new tools to make their peers a thing of the past. I hear they are paid handsomely. (Perhaps in pieces of silver?) Don’t worry, they haven’t succeeded yet.

This revolution—whatever this is—isn’t like the other technological revolutions which barged into our professional lives, such as the arrival of the web or smartphone apps. There was unbridled optimism alongside those changes, and they didn’t directly threaten the livelihoods of those who didn’t want to do that kind of work.

This is quite different. There is tremendous optimism to be found. Though I find it is almost entirely among the financially secure, as well as those with résumés decorated with elite appointments, who are confident they will merit one of the few seats in the lifeboats as the ocean liner slips into the deep carrying most of the people they knew on LinkedIn. (They’re probably right.) Alas, we can’t all be folks like Steve Yegge, can we?

For the rest of us who need to pay bills and take care of our children, there is fear. Some are panicked they will lose their jobs, or are concerned about the grim environmental, political, and social consequences AI is already inflicting on our planet. Others are climbing up the misty mountain steadily, yet they are still distressed that they will miss some crucial new development that they must know to survive and watch videos designed to make them more afraid. Still others refuse to start climbing and are silently haunted by the belief that their reservations are no longer valid.

Though we were so for my entire life, we can no longer be seen as a profession looking to the future. Instead, most of us are looking over our shoulders and listening for movement in the tall grass around us.

I too have been visited by a fear of the agents on many occasions over the past few years, but I keep it at bay…most nights.

One of the best ways I learned to manage it is pretty simple:

Stop listening to people who are afraid.

It’s odd to decide not to listen to so many people in your field, including nearly everyone in social media. I’ve never done this before.

Yet I learned this unexpected lesson when I was confronted by another difficult mountain in Acadia National Park a few years ago: Beehive.

Beehive is a well-known Acadia trail that has some sheer cliffs and is not for anyone truly afraid of heights. (The photo above is of three of my children climbing it a few years ago. Over the right shoulder of my 12-year-old daughter in the center is quite a drop.)

It was Beehive, and not Precipice, that taught me an unexpected lesson about popularity and fear that applies to AI.

So Beehive has an interesting name, is open most of the year, is close to the main tourist area and parking lots, and is often featured on signs and sweatshirts in souvenir stores. I even bought a sign for my attic.

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My older kids and I had done a lot of tough trails in Acadia over a few wonderful summers, and I wondered if we could handle Beehive. I started checking the online reviews. It sure sounded scary. I went to many websites and scanned hundreds of reviews over several days. The more I read, the less I wanted to try it.

Worse, the park rangers in Acadia are trained to not give anyone advice about what trail they can handle. (I get it.) No one else I spoke to wanted to tell a family they should try something dangerous. Everyone shrugged. It added to the fear.

Yet I saw conflicting evidence.

My research showed that only one person fell to their death decades ago, and the trail was modified after that. Also, many thousands of people of all types, including children and senior citizens, have done it without injury. On top of that, the mountain was not that high, and the difficult features it had, which I could see from detailed online photos, seemed quite similar to things we had done on a few other difficult trails. It didn’t seem like a big deal.

How could both things be true? Were they?

The truth was much closer to the second version, vindicated after we climbed it. It was a little scary at times, but wasn’t that physically challenging. It was fun, and something you could brag about among people who had heard it was scary, but who had not actually climbed it.

I do have a slight fear of heights, so I kept climbing and never turned to look down behind me. This brings me to another lesson:

You really never have to look down.

It’s amazing how people feel an obligation to once in a while look down to see what they’ve accomplished or to notice how high up they were or judge how dangerous the thing they just climbed looks from above. It often causes fear. I decided getting to the top was all that mattered, and I could look down only from up there. This is a question of focus.

I can think of many moments in learning to use and orchestrate coding agents where I unwisely stopped to “look down.” This takes the form of pausing and asking yourself things like:

• “Is this crazy technique really necessary? Isn’t the old way good enough?”
• “What about my favorite programming languages? Will languages matter in the future?”
• “What is the environmental cost of my queries?”
• “Am I getting worse at writing code myself?”
• “What if this agent keeps getting better? Will it get better than me?”
• “Am I missing some new AI development online right now? Should I check my feeds?”

None of those ruminations will help you get better with the agents. They just drain your energy when you should either rest or keep climbing.

I now see Beehive as an “attention vortex.” Because a lot of people talk about it, and because dramatic statements from the fearful and those boasting about their accomplishments dominate the reviews. The talk about Beehive is not tethered to the reality of climbing it.

Strangely, the cachet of having climbed it depends on the attention and fear. It made those who climbed it feel better about what they had done, and they had little interest in diminishing their accomplishment by tamping down the fear. (“Well, yes, it was scary up there!”) Nobody is invested in saying it was less than advertised. This insight is precisely why the loud coding agent YouTubers act the way they do.

AI is a planetary attention vortex. It has seemed like the only thing anyone in software development has talked about for over a year. People who quietly use the agents to improve their velocity—and aren’t particularly troubled by that—are not being heard. You aren’t seeing calm instructional videos from them on YouTube. We are instead seeing 30-year-olds pushing coding agent pornography on us every day, while telling us that their multiple-agent, infinite-token, unrestricted-permissions-YOLO workflow means we are doomed. (But you might survive if you hit the subscribe button on their channel, OK?) These confident hucksters are still peddling fear to keep you coming back to them.

Above all else, stop listening to anyone projecting fear. (Yes, you cannot avoid them entirely as they are everywhere and often tell you their worries unprompted.)

You must find useful information and shut out the rest. This is another lesson I learned:

When in an attention vortex, seek firsthand testimony, not opinions.

So the way I finally figured out Beehive wasn’t that bad was from some guy who took pictures of every part of the trail. I compared them to what I’d done on similar trails, such as the unpopular but delightful Beech Cliff trail, which nobody thought was truly dangerous and gets almost zero online attention.

When it comes to AI, I have abandoned opinions, predictions, and demos. I listen to senior people who are using agents on real project work, who are humble, who aren’t trying to sell me something, and who are not primarily afraid. (Examples are: Simon Willison, Martin Fowler, Jesse Vincent, and yes, quickly hand $15 each month to the indispensable Pragmatic Engineer.)

When it came to Precipice, widely acknowledged as the hardest hiking trail in Acadia, I took a different approach. (It’s actually not a hiking trail but a mountain climb without ropes.) Using the same investigative techniques I’d learned from Beehive, I found out it was three times longer and had scarier moments.

This gets us to another lesson.

Go with someone much more enthusiastic than you.

I don’t know how, but my athletic 13-year-old son is a daredevil. He’s up for any scary experience. I do not usually accompany him on the scary roller coasters.

He was totally up for Precipice, of course. Dad was very nervous.

But I knew that if anyone could drag me up that mountain, it was him. I also didn’t want to let him down. In fact, I almost decided to abort the mission at the bottom of the trail. I just sighed and thought, “I will just do the beginning part. We can duck out and take another route down until about one-third of the way up.”

So if you’re not sure how to use AI, or are not yet enthusiastic, find people who are and keep talking to them! You don’t have to abandon your friends or coworkers who aren’t as interested. Instead, become the enthusiast in their world. (That is what happened to me more than a year ago.)

Another reason I decided not to give up is that I bought different shoes.

You can hike most trails in regular sneakers in almost any condition. But since Precipice is a climb and not a hike, I realized my usual worn-out running shoes might not be up for that, as I had slid on them during a lesser climb elsewhere that week.

So while in nearby Bar Harbor, my family ducked into a sporting goods store and looked at hiking shoes for me and my son. I told the sales guy we were going to do Precipice. He raised an eyebrow and said I would of course need something good for that.

When I held the strange shoes in my hand, I looked at the price tag and then looked at my wife, who gave a knowing look back at me that surely meant, “OK, but you do realize that you actually have to climb it if we buy those.” I just nodded.

And we needed those new shoes! My son and I had a few tense moments scrambling where we agreed it was quite good we had them. But all along the way, they felt different, which was what I needed.

This reminds me of when I decided to use Claude Code a few weeks after it came out last March. The tokens cost 10 times what I could get elsewhere. But suddenly I was invested.

It also mattered that Claude Code, as a terminal, was a very different development experience. People back then thought it was strange that I was using a CLI to manage code. It was really different for me too, and all the better: I was no longer screwing around with code suggestions in GitHub Copilot.

This is a lesson I have taken to AI:

You must get different equipment.

You should be regularly experimenting with new tools that make you uncomfortable. Just using the new AI features in your existing tool is not enough for continuous growth or paradigm shifts, like the recent one from the CLI to multiple simultaneous agent management.

The last idea I have is to stop thinking about where all of us will end up one day.

Put the summit out of your mind.

While climbing Precipice, I decided to only think of what was in front of me. I knew it was a lot higher than Beehive. I just kept doing one more tough piece of it.

The advantage of doing this was near the top. Because the scariest piece was something I didn’t notice from online trail photos.

However, you can get an idea from this photo from Watson’s World, which I had not seen before I got up there. It shows a long cliff with a very short ledge (much shorter than it looks at this angle). Even the picture doesn’t make it clear just how exposed you are and that there is nothing behind you but a long, deadly fall. The bottom bars are to prevent your feet from slipping off.

When I came to it, I thought, “No…way.”

But there was no turning back by then. I had come so far! I looked up and saw the summit was just above this last traverse. So I just held onto the bars, held onto my breath, and moved carefully along the cliff right behind my son, who was suddenly more cautious.

Had I known that was up there, I might not have climbed the mountain. Good thing I didn’t know.

As for the future of software, I don’t know what lies further up the mountain we are on. There are probably some very strenuous and scary moments ahead. But we shouldn’t be worrying about them now.

We should just keep climbing.