Warning: AI was NOT used in the writing of this blog post.

Denial

Denial occurs when an Engineer never actually attempted to use AI to build an application and begins to flex their ego at the notion of an AI program being able to do something better than they could.

• • “It’s not even accurate.”

• • “It doesn’t know what it’s outputting.”

• • “Be careful all you developers that like to groove code.”

• • “You don’t know what it’s doing. It could take down the whole infrastructure!”

Anger

Anger sets in when you realize AI’s better at coding than you. Just as many of us developers of yesterday would comb the repo’s of GitHub looking for guidance on writing your next big app, AI does that for you. 10x faster! All that hard work you put into pounding the keyboard over the years has now been replaced by automated conditional statements accessing web pages and repositories and there’s nothing you or I can do to stop it.

Bargaining

I see bargaining as humoring your Boss that wants you to use AI in your workflow. Maybe if I tell him I used it, he’ll leave me alone about it. I’ll subscribe to Gemini. That’ll keep them off my back. I didn’t experience bargaining so I’m just guessing on this one. Thoughts? Leave them in the comments.

Depression

Your news feed begins to fill up with all the accomplishments people are achieving by using AI. You read about a startup that sold for Millions based off of 12 lines of code written with AI. You see other Engineer’s finding success with AI but you haven’t quite set the time aside to dive into coding with it.

Acceptance

Acceptance occurs when you realize half of Software Developers / Engineers are unemployed and eager to master AI in order to have your job. Then you have a stampede of graduates all of the world that are studying AI with specialty focus. It’s either run or get run over.

My Personal 5 Stages of AI Grief

Fortunately, I’ve only experienced denial and acceptance. Anytime there’s a new “flavor of the month” in tech, I immediately become familiar with it. I know that if it’s tech that becomes the “talk of the town”, it’s going to show up on the job posting’s minimum / preferred qualifications and I better be able to speak on it during an interview. Since beginning my AI journey in tech, I’ve produced 3 production-ready applications to include: SquidTest, SquIDPS, InSquident and a bunch more past the half way point of development sitting in my private repository. As for the warning given to all of us about the “dangers of groove coding”, I’ve also integrated CI/CD pipelines complete w/ Unit tests, SAST, DAST and awesomely thorough monitoring tools like Snyk, and you should too.