When AI Can Do Your Job, Who Else Are You?

Today’s big news, other than the Cloudflare outage (which one Every team member referred to as an “adult snow day”), is that Google’s latest version of its Gemini model, Gemini 3 Pro, is out. We’re testing it and will be publishing a Vibe Check shortly. Until then, Danny Aziz, general manager of Spiral, wrote about how AI coding tools changed his identity as a software engineer.—Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

For years, I told people I was a software engineer. It was what paid my bills and what defined me. My technical skills proved I had earned the right to belong to a certain world.

AI shattered that identity. Sometime in March 2025, the technical work that had defined me was suddenly being done by AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code without much need for my input. AI was solving the technical problems I used to solve by hand faster and better.

My initial response was fear. I’d always felt secure knowing I could get a job anywhere if things went wrong. Now AI could do the thing I got paid well to do. What was I worth? And who was I?

For the first time in my career, I had an unexpected gift: time. I finally had a chance to discover who I really was in a world where AI can write code as well as me—a shift that I know millions of other software developers are grappling with.

Choosing to go deeper

I saw two paths forward.

The first was coasting. I saw it on X—people letting agents do work while they made coffee or watched Netflix.

Then I noticed it in myself. I'd start an AI agent on a task and reflexively reach for my phone to scroll X or check messages. All the practices I'd spent years building to get into a flow state and achieve maximum concentration—optimal break timing, deep focus sessions—went out the window. The path of least resistance was distraction, and it was easy to rationalize when I was still getting the same amount of work done.

The second path was going deeper into my fear instead of basking in the free time AI had opened up for me. I could lean into the fear I felt—that AI could do what I got paid for, this skill I'd taught myself at the age of 15 and spent a decade mastering professionally working on consumer, cryptocurrency, and marketplace apps with engineering teams across Europe and the U.S. What if I used this freed-up time not to maintain the same output with less effort, but to expand into areas I'd always been curious about but never had time for?

I chose the second path. It felt like the best long-term decision. Instead of succumbing to the fear of AI stealing my job, I needed to sit with that fear and see what happened.

But it was not the easy choice because it required that I actively resist laziness. I started putting my phone face-down on a windowsill when I entered the office. During the gaps while agents worked, I consciously chose to examine myself instead of scroll.

Decks that actually close deals

Great decks win business deals, but they take a lot of time to make. Pitch gives you everything you need to go from blank canvas to winning presentation. Edit slides, start with designer-approved templates, and embed high-quality videos. Work together with slide assignments and comments, then make your clients feel special with curated pitch rooms. With their latest AI features, you’re able to make sure your business looks good for the right people, without losing creative control.

Try Pitch for free at pitch.com

Want to sponsor Every? Click here.

Where the craft went

I didn't immediately know what "going deeper" looked like. I'd stare at Spiral, Every’s AI writing tool that I manage and was in the process of rebuilding. I have always kept a journal of my daily life on my laptop, but I started writing down questions and trying to answer them: What else could I be doing during agent wait times? What am I drawn to that I never had space for?

The responses that I recorded kept pointing to similar themes: how users experienced a product and what emotions a product elicited in them. I hadn’t had time to explore these areas in earnest because I had been too busy writing code.

A few weeks into this journaling practice, I noticed something had shifted. When I thought about my work, I wasn't framing problems as a software engineer anymore. Instead of thinking only about how data moves from one part of the application to the other, I was thinking like a product maker—someone who cares about how things feel in people's hands and whether the experience serves the user.

While building Spiral, I asked myself questions such as: “How do I feel after looking at this feature?” “What were my expectations when I first looked at it?” “What was the first thing that came to mind?” “What am I expecting it to do when I click this button or move through this step?”

I started spending time and energy on design decisions I’d always deprioritized. For example, Spiral shows you the drafts of writing samples created by AI alongside the chat window in which you are conversing with it. I asked myself if this amount of information was visually overwhelming for the user and decided that the user should only be shown a maximum of three drafts.

Another benefit of this shift was becoming more comfortable with building things that might not work out. In the past, I'd launched products I knew weren't quite right—the interaction felt off, the flow was clunky—because I'd spent days building them and felt that it would be a waste of work not to ship them. Now, if something didn't feel good, I could scrap it and iterate. The agent had done the work, not me.

In Spiral, when a user switches Workspaces, a feature that lets users give the AI different files or context depending on the business or project, the background color changes based on the user’s Workspace icon. This little feature makes the product feel more polished and cohesive, but I would have never deemed it important enough to allocate time to previously. AI had sped up the time needed to code this feature so much—by something like 10 to 100 times—that it didn't feel like such a big investment if it didn't pan out.

The skills I developed as a software engineer—mapping out the structure of a software project before building, thinking through edge cases, planning carefully—didn't disappear. I still use them. But now I can apply that same rigor to product decisions, design choices, and user experience. The care for craft flows into adjacent areas I didn't know I could be good at.

Why other engineers get stuck

I see the same fear I initially felt about AI in many engineering teams.

I recently joined a client call with Natalia Quintero, Every’s head of consulting, where an engineering leader was frustrated: His 100-person team wouldn’t adopt AI tools, so he needed outside help to convince them.

I immediately knew what was happening. These engineers were protecting their identity.

Engineers had built their entire professional identity on having a rare, valuable skill and spent years mastering something most people couldn't do. Adopting AI coding assistants meant admitting that the thing that made them special could now be done by anyone with a subscription to the tool. They aren’t ready for that. So they'd rather hold back and protect who they think they are than discover who they could become.

Whether AI takes your job or not doesn't matter. Your job is already changing. Now you can figure out what strengths you didn’t have time to nurture. But you have to let go of the container that held you and see what else you were meant to do.

How do you actually do that?

How to find your new identity

I didn’t have a map, but here's what worked for me. This practice helped me notice what was already there inside me so I could lean into it even further.

Week 1: Write in a journal during AI wait times

AI creates gaps in your work—30 seconds while it generates code, two minutes while it fixes your test, five minutes while it researches. During the next one, don't scroll. Stare at what you're working on and write:

What else could I be doing right now on this project?
What detail am I skipping that I'm curious about?
What part of this work do I keep rushing past?

Don't force it. Just notice what comes up. Do this for a week. You're not looking for a grand revelation—you're looking for a pattern in what keeps showing up.

For me, my answers kept pointing to how things felt: Did the animations feel clunky? Did the user interface make sense? Did buttons do what I expected them to do when I clicked? For you, it might be something different; maybe it will be adjacent to what you're already great at. For example, if you are great at reorganizing code to be cleaner, you might also be great at improving operation workflows in your company.

Week 2: Follow one curiosity

Once you notice what keeps coming up in your writing, follow it. Pick a small thread to start.

If you keep noticing that your eyes are gravitating toward one piece of the software that’s different from what you’re trying to achieve—in other words, the visual hierarchy is bothering you—spend 30 minutes adjusting it. If you keep wondering how users would react to this feature, watch someone use it. If you keep thinking about the system architecture, sketch out how it could be better.

Use AI to handle the parts you don't know how to do. The point isn't to become an expert in something new. It’s to see what happens when you finally have space to care about something you've always been curious about.

Month 1: Let the identity shift

As you follow these curiosities, pay attention to how you think about your work.

Are you still framing problems the old way? Or is something shifting?

You might notice something similar to the shift I felt in thinking like a software engineer to thinking like a product maker. You might not.

Quarter 1: Build something from the new place

Once you notice the shift, lean into it deliberately. Pick a small project that you can build from this new perspective.

For me, it was building Spiral with attention to how it feels for the user, not just how it works, though subtle adjustments in how much information is shown to the user at one time and the way colors are displayed.

For you, it might be redesigning a feature you've always thought was clunky, writing documentation that helps instead of just explains, or building a system with the user journey in mind, not just technical efficiency.

At the end of this practice, you will understand that when AI can do your job, you are still something—and something greater than before.

Danny Aziz is the general manager of Spiral. You can follow him on X at @dannyaziz97 and on LinkedIn.

To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

We build AI tools for readers like you. Write brilliantly with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Deliver yourself from email with Cora. Dictate effortlessly with Monologue.

We also do AI training, adoption, and innovation for companies. Work with us to bring AI into your organization.

Get paid for sharing Every with your friends. Join our referral program.

For sponsorship opportunities, reach out to [email protected].