Nope, I didn’t retire.
For over a year, I treated AI like a junior developer. It could write boilerplate. It could explain an error message. It could save me a few keystrokes. But the engineering stayed in my rapidly withering hands.
Last week, I gave up.
Not because AI suddenly became smarter. Because everyone else did.
I created an “engineering-intelligence” repository in my workspace. The process is simple: documentation creates more documentation until eventually documentation creates software. This repository contains the minutiae of my existence: tribal knowledge, architecture decisions, compliance notes, coding standards, feature inventories, and all the unwritten rules that once lived only in the recesses of my corrupted mind.
If Markdown is ever no longer in vogue, I’m in trouble!
Brilliant, right?
I proudly showed the system to my coding partner.
“Yeah,” he said. “My friends have already started doing this.”
Oh great… I’m late to the rat race.
My dad would recognize this feeling.
Technology shifts are fast.
Toward the end of his career, my dad was an industry indexer and directory publisher. Every year, he maintained the records of hundreds of graphic, industrial, and package design firms across the United States. He mailed each company a copy of its listing, asking them to mark corrections in pen and return it in the enclosed envelope. Then he painstakingly updated the next edition. He repeated that process for nearly twenty years, selling the finished directory back to design firms and school libraries.
When the internet arrived, he didn’t ignore it. With my help, we built a website called Design Search. It was the best we knew how to build at the time: PERL/CGI, text files instead of a database, and a lot of optimism.
Around this time, Yahoo had made its triumphant entry into anything and everything. “Design Search” became a dodo, and my dad took this as a signal to retire.
The world no longer needed a $50, expertly typeset, soft-cover directory.
Thirty years later, I find myself staring at a similar shift.
My repository is my version of the old man’s Design Search.
I hope I’ve recognized that this isn’t just a new tool. It’s a new way of working.
I’m just not yet certain whether I’m building the future… or preserving the past.