Ten years getting further from the keyboard. Lead, then manager, then the role where your calendar is the deliverable and a good day is one where nothing caught fire. I was good at it. That's not the confession here.
The confession is I missed building — and I waited long enough that the ground moved under me. Agents write code now. They draft, refactor, explain themselves, argue back when you're wrong. The keyboard's still on the desk. The job in front of it is not the one I left.
"So you're forty-something and crawling back to junior work while the kids ship circles around you." That's the voice in your head. Maybe in your standup. To wit: I call bullshit — and I'll show my work.
The bet
There's a flattering version of this story where coming back to the keyboard is the brave, hard pivot. It isn't. The hard pivot is the guy who leaves IT to open a vineyard — new field, no foundation, starting from zero with the meter running. That's a real gamble.
This is the opposite. I already know how systems fail, how to smell a bad estimate from across the room, how to ship something humans actually use. Returning to building is doubling down on thirty years of pattern-matching, not throwing it away. The leverage is sitting right there on the desk. Picking it up is the easy bet. Leaving it there is the expensive one.
The part you can't hand off
Here's the trap, though. Agents make it frictionless to outsource your thinking. Karpathy put it better than I can: you can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding. You can ship code you don't understand now — faster than anyone ever could. Right up until 2am, when it breaks, and the thing that wrote it can't tell you why either.
So the skill was never typing. It never really was. It's judgment — knowing what's worth building, smelling when the agent is confidently, fluently wrong, owning the parts that matter. Twenty years of leading wasn't a detour away from that. It was the training for it.
What this is
Notes from the trenches. Short, a few times a week. What's changed, what hasn't, where the new tools earn their keep and where they'll waste your whole afternoon. The anchor is EuroRails, which I'm co-developing — real stakes, which is the only thing that keeps writing like this honest.
And if you're forty-something in IT — a manager, a program lead, a recovering agile coach — quietly wondering whether you've still got it: there's a lot of us. That's who I'm writing for. Pull up a chair.