"We tried something similar in 2016."
"It depends."
The senior developer possesses several unusual abilities:
- locating production issues by staring silently at logs
- reading stack traces faster than documentation
- deleting 4,000 lines of code without elevated heart rate
- identifying fragile infrastructure purely from file names
When introduced to a "revolutionary new JavaScript framework," the senior developer typically asks:
- How large is the bundle?
- Who maintains it?
- Will it still exist in two years?
Researchers initially misidentified this behavior as negativity.
It was later classified as experience.
Exhibit 06 - The AI Era (2022 – Present)
Please proceed carefully.
This exhibit is evolving in real time.
For decades, developers searched the internet for answers.
Then the answers started talking back.
The modern developer no longer writes code alone. An AI now sits beside them at all times: infinitely fast, endlessly confident, and occasionally catastrophically wrong.
Observe a preserved AI-assisted workflow:
Developer:
"Build me a scalable auth system with retry logic,
clean architecture, and proper error handling."
AI:
[creates something impressive and deeply suspicious]
Developer:
"Not like that."
AI:
[creates something different and equally suspicious]
Developer:
[accepts 73% of it, fixes the dangerous parts,
and ships to production]
Entire categories of work changed almost overnight.
- Boilerplate disappeared.
- Syntax memory became optional.
- Junior developers began shipping features in days that once took weeks.
A new skill emerged instead:
knowing how to explain what you actually want.
Prompt engineering. Communication. Context. Clear thinking.
Turns out these mattered more than everyone expected.
Senior developers adapted differently. Their value shifted from writing code quickly to recognizing subtle architectural mistakes before they reached production.
The experience has been described as:
"Pair programming with an infinitely confident intern who has read the entire internet."
Entire codebases now appear overnight:
- beautifully formatted
- well documented
- occasionally solving a completely different problem than intended
The humans still review.
The humans still decide.
The humans still deploy hotfixes on Friday night.
Some traditions survive every technological revolution.
Exhibit 07 - The Lost Rituals
Many ancient practices have quietly disappeared. The museum has preserved them here for educational purposes.
-
Reading Documentation. Once considered the first step. Now often attempted only after the third Stack Overflow thread and two AI prompts fail. Ironically, documentation has quietly gotten much better.
-
Memorizing Syntax. Modern developers ask the AI. This is arguably fine.
-
Closing Browser Tabs. Declared impossible sometime around 2017. No recovery in sight.
-
The "Temporary Fix." Despite the name, several temporary fixes from 2014 are still in production today, now considered load-bearing infrastructure.
-
The 2 AM Deploy. Once a beloved tradition where developers, filled with optimism and a light disregard for consequences, pushed changes to production late on a Friday. Though officially discouraged, sightings still occur in the wild.
Some rituals faded. Others simply evolved.
Final Exhibit - The Developer, Unchanged
Despite dramatic evolutionary changes across three decades, all developer generations share the same core behaviors.
Every developer, regardless of era:
- believes the current bug "should be simple"
- feels a quiet dread when asked to touch legacy code
- has deployed something unintentionally and aged visibly in that moment
- has pasted code from the internet and silently asked the universe for help
The tools changed. The languages changed. The frameworks changed. The AI arrived.
But the developer remained the same person, sitting in front of a screen at 2:13 in the morning, reading an error message, thinking some version of the same thought that every developer since 2008 has thought:
"Surely someone on the internet has suffered before me."
They had. They answered. It is still there, upvoted 847 times, from a thread opened in 2011.
Thank you for visiting the museum.
The gift shop sells mechanical keyboards, unfinished side projects, and a mug that says "it depends."
Which exhibit do you belong to? Drop it in the comments.
I’ll say mine in the comments first.
🤝 Stay in Touch