Uncertainty, fear and panic
AI is taking your job!
There is probably no chance that you haven’t seen an article or a video like that.
Working in IT, I’ve been bombarded with this narrative every day. It’s hard to stay immune to news like this. The idea that something could take my job and make me homeless triggers fear. You start breathing heavier, realizing it could potentially change your life. And let’s be honest — your mind immediately jumps to the worst-case scenario.
As if that’s not enough, people around you start talking about AI as well. Or they ask questions like:
“What will you do when AI takes your job?”
That question triggers an odd feeling in my body. I feel slightly irritated. A bit attacked.
Most of the time, the people asking don’t really understand what AI even means — and yet the question still lands.
When I started rationalizing that reaction, it became clear why it hits so hard.
It attacks something deeper than a job. It attacks my value system.
It challenges what I am — or what I think I am.
I needed some time to understand why I’m so strongly connected to my job title, or even my profession. Yes, the salary is good. It provides a comfortable life. But it shouldn’t be the core of who I am.
The problem is — I did make it my identity.
I had a perfect excuse for anything that wasn’t going well in my life. I had this shiny object called Developer to hide behind. That was my joker.
After the panic and fear settled, I had to step back and think about the situation more clearly — what is real, and what is not.
In my circle, no one has actually lost their job because of AI. We often say that people will lose jobs, but for now things are changing in a different direction. People are becoming more productive and able to work on a broader range of problems.
(All of them are seniors, just to note.)
I see this in myself as well. I feel more productive. Things I didn’t know before, I can now pick up much faster. Even boring tasks — like upgrading Amplify from version 4 to version 6 — became manageable. Without tools like ChatGPT or Claude, that would have been a real pain.
At that point, something became obvious.
The problem isn’t AI.
The problem is me — and my resistance to change.
I identified too strongly with my job. Anything that threatened that idea felt like an enemy. Why would I even consider changing when life was good? Why disturb the comfort?
Well… the world doesn’t stop developing just because I’m comfortable now.
I could write here about some dramatic transformation — how I got reborn or completely changed. That would be a lie.
This is a hard pill that needs to be swallowed.
We are living in the best time in history, and that isn’t free. It demands change. Fast adaptation. The safety we had five years ago will probably not exist in the same form again — and I’m quite sure it won’t.
AI is the shiny object of this moment.
I started learning it — not because I plan to become an ML engineer or a math wizard, but because I want to understand how it works. I need to be honest with myself about that.
Right now, my first step is simple. I use ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot in my day-to-day work. I’ve been doing that for a while. The next step is understanding LLMs better — how the system works, how things connect. Building small agents. Playing. Enjoying the process of being a beginner again.
In the next post, I’ll share how I’m experimenting with local LLMs and making them work.
The fear of change is always there. We’re constantly bombarded with alarming news, and it makes everything harder to process. Sometimes the only thing you can do is take a step back, look at reality as it is, and focus on what you can actually control.
There’s a chance I’m wrong. No one really knows what will happen.
These are just the thoughts that went through my head — and how I felt.
Fear is okay to have.
I just don’t want it to make decisions instead of me.