31 March 2026
You know how the startup community loves to talk about "disrupting" industries? Well, thanks to the general magic of large language models, combined with the capitalist drive of huge VC-backed companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, we find ourselves not imposing one, but having one imposed on us. And I'm pretty sure, we don't like it.
(This is the first in an anticipated series of blog posts, in which I muse out loud about the "things I think I think". I find that writing out my thoughts helps me reecognize, categorize, and summarize them. If you find value in them, dear reader, I am happy, but keep in mind I am not really writing these to persuade or educate; in fact, it's fair to say I'm not really writing them for you at all.)
Over the past several months, I've been responsible for spinning up a more formalized Developer Relations function within Nutrient. On the surface of it, it's not a hard problem: They are a developer-facing product company, originally a developer who wrote a thing that people wanted to pay for, and grew. Their current product suite consists of selling document+workflow solutions, both libraries and server-hosted functionality, and they've historically sold through inbound marketing leads (aka, "Our customers found us"). There's any number of things that we could start with; we could do some Reach-oriented activities, like Articles, Blogs, or even spin up an Hackathon or two, which could/would/should improve our inbound leads. Or we could do some Interactivity-boosting activities, a la an Ambassadors, or a few Conference Sessions. Maybe even pair hard with the Sales team and so a bunch of Customer Pre-Sales work.
But the ugly part of this story is the simple fact that most of us are living in some degree of quivering. Whether with existential dread, anticipatory excitement, or outright ambiguity, we're all of us "on edge" because of the recent Rise of the LLM Coding Agents. There's some folks who are oozing a brazen confidence that "This is the new thing", usually coupled with a sales pitch, either for their product or for their newsletter (as the most recent newly-self-christened Thought Leader, of course). Other folks exude the vibe of "I've been there, it's slop, don't stress about it". For a much larger percentage of us, it's creating some serious anxiety:
That last one, by the way, hits really hard, because for the past twenty-five years, ever since the Internet made its mainstream debut, we've all of us in this industry felt like we had a safe harbor in which to park our boats. Sure, yeah, we've had our swells--the streets ran red in 2001 when 9/11 combined to create the "Dot-Bomb" Era, and again in 2008 when the sub-prime mortgage crisis triggered some financial fluctuation that claimed a lot of jobs. But for the most part, this industry has been seen as one of the "safest" in which to labor, particularly when compared to just about any other blue collar job, a la manufacturing.
(Interestingly enough, in my Rethinking Enterprise keynote, I use the line "Tell me the secret sauce, the magic pill, ... the "best practice"... that will help me stay employed for the forseeable future". That one was about the shift from "enterprise" technologies to what we later called "microservice" technologies, and it was way less disruptive than what we're seeing now. But, still, it's the same merry-go-round, just... bigger and faster and with a lot more sharp places to land if you get thrown off.)
There's a deep karmic element here, because for close to thirty years, we software folks have often been at the center of practicing "disruption" on all these other industries. Most recently, we were going to replace taxi drivers with autonomous vehicles (remember Waymo? Waze? Uber before they became a taxi service and food-delivery company?). We've spent four decades replacing assembly-line workers with robots of one form or another, but even receptionists (both the front-desk and phone variety) are now commonly replaced by phone trees and kiosks. For three of those four decades, we've inflicted "disruption" on other industries by putting them in front of a computer and some bespoke software we wrote in the name of "efficiency" and "cost savings" and expected them to go along with it willingly if not happily. When they protested that they would lose their jobs if they helped us as "subject matter experts" to get the software right, we told them "No way! You'll just get promoted now that you can do more" and beat for the door before the pink slip arrived. We confidently referred their questions about their future longevity to their boss so that we could avoid uncomfortable conversations. Besides, if they really wanted to be in a career with longevity, they'd teach themselves programming.
Say it with me: EYE-roh-nEEEEEEE....
This, folks, is what it feels like to be "disrupted". It's a maelstrom of chaos and anxiety. Nobody's quite sure what's happening next. Whose jobs are safe. Whose are in danger. Where the high ground is in order to avoid the flood that we all feel coming, that deep rumbling within the earth beneath us. What new language or tool do we need to learn? Should we learn to build our own models? Which coding agent is the "best" (meaning, which one will outlive the others and survive) to learn (because if I can help it, I only want to learn one)?
A number of years ago, back in 2007, Alan Greespan (the Chairman of the Fed during the Boom Times) wrote his memoir, The Age of Turbulence, in which he described how the US has historically been able to bend and adjust to the "whirlwinds of creative destruction" that periodically strike:
"Creative destruction is the principal driving force of economic progress, the “perennial gale” that uproots businesses—and lives—but that, in the process, creates a more productive economy. With rare exceptions the only way to increase output per hour is to allocate society’s resources to areas where they will produce the highest returns—or, in more formal language, to direct society’s gross domestic savings (plus savings borrowed from abroad) to fund cutting-edge technologies and organizations. Creation and destruction are Siamese twins. The process involves displacing previously productive assets and their associated jobs with newer technologies and their jobs." (p. 13)
This is one of those times, and if you're one of those "previously productive assets" about to be "displaced", man, it becomes hard to keep faith in capitalism. A more productive economy is all well and good, but when the "good" seems to go to all the people at the top, and it seems the "well" just keeps getting deeper and deeper around you.... Yeah suddenly maybe "the economy" isn't quite as important as it once was.
But if there's a silver lining to the whole idea, it's that this "creative destruction" leaves more opportunity behind it than it guts on its path through the world:
"A striking number of the machines that have revolutionized productivity look like improvised contraptions. Cyrus McCormick’s threshing machine, described by the London Times as a cross between a flying machine and a wheelbarrow,7 helped to produce a 500 percent increase in output per hour for wheat and a 250 percent increase in output for corn from its invention in 1831 to the end of the nineteenth century. In the process, it helped to displace as much as a quarter of the world’s agricultural labor force. In 1800, a farmer working hard with a scythe could harvest only a single acre in a day. By 1890 two men using two horses could cut, rake, and bind twenty acres of wheat in the same time." (p.15)
That reduced the total agricultural labor force, but also increased the available labor pool within cities, wherein a much greater set of opportunities lay, and helped create the pool of people that we would now call "the labor force". More subtly, though, their offspring (once we established child labor laws) would congregate within public schools, gain an education that far exceeded what they would have received living in their small towns and farms, and would go on to become what we now refer to as "the middle class".
Lots of people like to use the example of how the car replaced the horse. In fact, though, the horse's eventual replacement by machinery was much trickier and more complex than that:
"It can take a long time for a new technology to change an economy: the spread of Samuel Morse’s telegraph was complicated by the size of the country and the difficulty of the terrain. Though telegraph wires quickly blanketed the East Coast and the more densely inhabited parts of the West Coast, giving people access to almost instant communications, the center of the country remained an information void. In the late 1850s, it still took more than three weeks to convey a message from one coast to the other by a combination of telegraph and stagecoach. Sometimes old technologies can work in tandem with new ones: starting in 1860, the Pony Express, with its riders leaping from one horse to another fresh one, reduced the time it took to get a message across the country to under ten days. The ponies were much more flexible than more advanced methods of transport such as wagons or trains: riders could ride up steep ravines and negotiate narrow trails."
"But Ted," some will argue, "By 1910 we had cars, and poof, no more horses."
"The Nation magazine addressed the paradox of the popularity of the horse in the age of steam in October 1872:
Our talk has been for so many years of the railroad and steamboat and telegraphy, as the great “agents of progress,” that we have come almost totally to overlook the fact that our dependence on the horse has grown almost pari passu with our dependence on steam. We have opened up great lines of steam and communication all over the country, but they have to be fed with goods and passengers by horses. We have covered the ocean with great steamers, but they can neither load nor discharge their cargoes without horses.11
"For several decades America’s equine population grew more than twice as fast as its human population, from 4.3 million horses and mules in 1840 to 27.5 million in 1910. That meant that the ratio of horses and mules to people increased over seventy years of pell-mell progress from one to every five humans to one to every three. People used horses to drive mills, pull plows, walk alongside canal boats, herd cattle, fight battles, and above all, carry burdens for short distances. It took the combination of three kinds of power to displace horses from the heart of the American economy. Steam power replaced horses for long-distance hauling. Electric power replaced them for urban transport. And “horseless carriages” replaced them for short hauls."
"But Ted, this is different. It's more like electricity, when it was introduced."
"Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive. Introducing electricity was not just a matter of plugging factories into the electricity grid. It involved redesigning entire production processes and replacing vertical factories with horizontal ones to get the best out of the new power source." (p. 17)
And, point of fact, many companies around the turn of the last century had "Chief Electricity Officers", whose job was to manage the infrastructure and use of electricity within the company.
And today, companies are hiring "Chief AI Officers", often from the same pool from which we hired "Chief Data Officers" just a half-decade ago. (Nobody's saying what happened to our "Chief Blockchain Officers", though, which is weird... you think they're OK?)
My point here is really one of faith: That yes, this is another one of those whirlwinds of creative destruction, and it's scary as hell. This is what living in the middle of the maelstrom looks like. And if we lean into the analogy of the storm, recognize that there's some point at which everything will suddenly become quiet and still, like you suddenly see how everything works together and how it's all going to work out--which means you're in the eye, and it's about to get a whole lot worse because you're only halfway through it.
But storms do pass, eventually, and in clearing away whatever was there before, we have a chance to rebuild and do something entirely new and different, or the same thing but better now that we have the opportunity/requirement to rebuild. It's not always fun--in fact, it's very often the very opposite of fun. It's scary, it's panic-inducing, it's the very definition of stress in that it's worrying about something over which we really have zero control.
Unfortunately, as with many things in life, it is, and wishing it weren't isn't going to help anything or anyone.