Nobody Knows What They’re Worth

On the strange dissatisfaction of getting everything we wanted.

I don’t know what I’m worth anymore. I know what my skills were worth three years ago based on what people were willing to pay for them. But I have no idea what they’ll be worth six months from now at this pace. I suspect most in tech don’t either.

Right now it’s easy to imagine a future in which almost everything is possible in software with AI, while struggling to imagine our precise need in it.

I believe this uncertainty weighs on people more heavily than care to admit it.

So we default to working, making plans, and talking about the future as though we are certain.

I cofounded a small company building tools for people who develop software with AI. I can’t tell you what the company is worth with much confidence. It depends on what you believe about the future, over what horizon and whether a frontier lab decides to give away something similar to what we sell.

I have never shipped more software than I do now. It works. People use it. None of it would exist if I hadn’t decided to build it. Yet when I close my laptop at night, I increasingly feel less satisfied.

I’ve been trying hard via introspection to understand why.

For my entire working life, I’ve taken pride in doing difficult things. I liked getting stuck and finding my way out of the maze. I liked knowing things others didn’t. I took satisfaction in the results due to knowing what I had to endure to get there.

Now I can get those results without the same struggle.

If something was hard and I could do it, then surely I had something valuable to offer. And if someone paid me well to do it, I had little reason to question that belief.

For twenty years, being good at something difficult was enough to give me a place in the world. I knew what people needed from me.

I know I’m not alone in this. We spent our lives learning to be useful. We went to school, developed skills, worked long hours, and became good at things other people needed. We found our place by becoming difficult to replace (not irreplaceable). Some of us came to love the work. Others simply loved being good at it.

Every new model release trivializes more of the work we concerned ourselves with. I can see how much better the world might become as a result while also seeing how much less it might need from us to get there.

There is not enough clear-headed discussion about how horrifying this makes us feel.

It’s different from the fear of losing a job to AI because it strikes at the very heart of why we worked so hard to become good at anything in the first place. A job is what someone pays you to do. Being needed is part of how you know you matter. You can lose the second without losing the first.

I recognize distinctly how much of my identity is built around being capable of things that other aren’t because I loved the feeling of being the person who could do it. It’s easy to mistake that feeling for purpose.

I don’t have a satisfying answer to any of this, which is to say tomorrow, I’ll open my laptop, look at what the latest models can do, and put them to work.

I spent twenty years becoming good at things that were hard to do. I never properly considered how much I’d miss the difficulty.