Thread. I thought I was immune from ever feeling hollowed out by AI as a programmer, because I've always gotten far more enjoyment from shipping, getting users, and solving problems than indulging in the art of coding. As the LLMs have eaten deeper and deeper into our field, I've empathized with my peers who've expressed a sense of loss and disillusionment as the art of programming has become more and more automated. But, I've always seen myself as someone who saw coding as a means to an end to solve problems. Not something whose craftsmanship, culture, methodologies, and fads were worth getting too hung up on, beyond what was needed to adeptly deliver value to others and not fall behind the (frankly, rare) genuine advancements over the years. This all changed for me over the last week. The frontier probably shifted a bit earlier than today, but I didn't see it until now. The change has come about for me because GPT-5.5 was able to build complex software I needed built autonomously for 2-3 days at a clip. Work that would have taken me months, or even years if you include learning the requisite languages, libraries, and tooling, being completed over a weekend. This isn't something I think anyone who has been programming as long as I have can really be prepared for, this kind of velocity jump is just mindboggling. This is truly superhuman performance - it's not perfect, and there certainly is a level of simplicity and clarity that would come in the hands of the world's best programmers, but that margin is so small so as to be unnoticable when contrasted with the sheer volume of working software that it can produce per unit time. So, why has this caused a shift in the way I feel about these technologies, after all this time not having felt it as each subsequent model advanced closer to what we see now? There are two reasons. First, it's clear that the age of humans understanding how software works is over. Yes, humans will need to understand things, at least for a few more years, but we are now at a kind of escape velocity where the % of lines of code that are created every year that are even read, nevermind understood, by humans, is now permanently declining. But the real shift, is I am no longer a programmer, I am a manager. Good managers do not take credit for the work of their team - they see themselves in service of their team. Up until now, claiming "I built this" still felt true when talking about things I had created with the help of LLMs. But now, when the LLMs are writing thousands of lines of code, and I am simply providing guidance, direction setting, and oversight to catching the bigger errors, I found myself in the bizarre situation (that many will be in soon, I presume) of no longer feeling entitled to take credit for the work being done. Not being able to say "I built this" when sharing something whose basic conception came from my own mind, but under the tireless effort of these insane machines to actually reason through and materialize into a working solution, is devastating. Not because of the fact it doesn't feel truthful now, but because I know it will never be truthful again for myself and soon for all of the rest of us.