You Can't Take the Career Path I Took. It No Longer Exists.

I started out at a small company that built websites and ran something like a customer service desk. Requests kept coming in: add photos to the site, publish a news item, a client ran out of email quota, add 1 GB.

I wasn't building anything. I was poking around in other people's live websites. But that was the first lesson of this profession: before I wrote my first line of code, I learned not to break someone else's production.

Then a promotion to junior developer, working with WordPress. Slicing templates from Photoshop, coding them by hand, wiring them into PHP. Nobody wanted that work, so the junior did it. Meaning me.

Only after changing companies did I land under the right wings, and the real learning began. Training, tens of thousands of lines of code written and rewritten. Angular, Vue, and finally React.

The entry price

Everything I know today came out of that boring, manual work. Small client requests taught me respect for production. Sliced templates taught me how layout actually works. And thousands of lines rewritten between frameworks taught me how paradigms differ, not just what they're called.

In 2026, you no longer have to go through most of that work. Snippets generate in milliseconds and the code works right away. At least in the demo. After a few sessions with AI, it's easy to feel like a senior frontend backend AI prompt engineer. Everything's fine until something blows up in production. Then the panic starts, because nobody knows what's sitting under the generated code, and the Claude Code limit doesn't reset for another 4 hours.

The new currency

I'm not criticizing this path. We're not going back to the old one. But the entry price to this profession didn't drop to zero. It changed currency.

You used to pay in hours of manual work, and the learning came as a side effect, whether you wanted it or not. Today you have to organize that learning yourself:

• read the generated diff line by line,
• understand what each change is for and what its consequences might be,
• and when something breaks, form your own hypothesis and check the logs before you ask AI for the fix again.

Work used to force this on you. Now you have to demand it from yourself.

You can't take my path. But the road from "the code works" to "I understand why it works, and I can fix it" is still one you have to walk yourself.

AI shortened the first part. It won't do the second one for you.