There's an old heuristic that says if you want to become an expert at something, you need to spend ~10,000 hours of your life doing that thing.
It seems reasonable to assume that someone with 10,000+ hours of practice and experience doing a thing would be reasonably good at doing that thing. Even if your only goal is to slack off and get away with doing as little real work as possible, with 10,000 hours of practice you'd probably be one of the world's best slackers.
What's the point? (oh please don't say AI). You guessed it, the point is AI. Let's do some quick math. Let's say you work professionally as a software developer or engineer. Subtracting sick days, holidays, and vacations, let's assume you work ~45 weeks out of the year. Assuming an average 40-hour work week, let's say you get to spend half of your time on actual software development or software engineering.
These assumptions give us 20 hours a week for 45 weeks of the year (sorry weekend projects don't count here because I'm trying to low-ball the numbers), that's 900 hours per year spent on professional software development. If you want to round up-or-down based on the average number of weeks and hours you typically work, go for it. In fact, let's pad the numbers and say our theoretical developer works on their craft for 1,000 hours a year.
Well that makes the next formula easy. If we're trying to get to 10,000 hours, and we hone our craft for ~1,000 hours per year, by my math it would take someone 10 years to become an expert. Let's say for the rockstar 10x devs among us, they can reach the 10,000 hour mark in half the time (or only 5 years). Fine with me.
Now you've spent at least 5 years of your life honing your craft. For some of us the timeframe is much much longer. Many software engineers from the millennial generation are surpassing 20 years of real-world hands-on experience.
What did it mean then, when the Opus 4.5 model showed up and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is a far superior developer and engineer than I could ever be? What should I do? Over 10,000 hours of practice and training, completely humbled by an agentic AI system. I could spend another 10,000 hours honing my craft and still wouldn't match the competence of Opus 4.5, let alone the newer models like Opus 4.8, Fable, or Mythos.
Obviously this created a sense of existential dread within me. Suddenly I felt how the scribes of the past must have felt with the advent of the printing press. Or how early accountants and bookkeepers felt in the face of the spreadsheet.
To paraphrase Darwin, it's not the strongest or the fastest that survive, but those most adaptable to change. The world of software engineering has undergone a tectonic shift. The ground is crumbling beneath many of us, but there still seems to be hope for those of us who can wield these new tools effectively.
As Yoda said to Luke:
"You must unlearn, what you have learned."
It seems unlearning old things can be just as mentally challenging as learning new things. We form strong opinions over the course of our careers and sometimes it's hard to realize when those opinions have become obsolete, and could even lead to our eventual extinction.
But hey, try not to lose sleep over it.