Solid Ground: An Ordinary Developer's Notes on the AI Era
What I Thought Was Solid Ground: An Ordinary Developer's Notes on the AI Era
I went up a mountain with a tangled mind.
There was no destination. I just felt I had to walk. Anyone who has stared at a screen long enough knows the feeling — when something won't unknot, you have to look away to finally see it. That day, the screen wasn't the problem, but the instinct to leave my seat was the same. I put on my shoes, and my feet pointed me toward the mountain. I'm not sure if it was a conscious choice. Maybe I just wanted to be somewhere high. Maybe from up there, the place I was standing now would look small.
If I'm being honest, nothing got sorted. If anything, things got more tangled.
But one thing came into view. The path.
There are several kinds of trails on a mountain.
There are paths so trampled that the ground is fully packed. Every step lands on something firm. No matter how hard you stomp, no footprint remains. That path has been hardened by thousands, tens of thousands of feet that came before. The hardness isn't an illusion — it really is hard. But that hardness isn't yours. You're just standing briefly on hardness made by countless others. The path doesn't remember you.
There are dirt paths. Footprints stay. Not just one, but many footprints in many directions and depths, layered on top of each other. Some grazed lightly, some sank in deep. The same path, but no two people walk it the same way. Each at their own pace, their own weight, leaving their own trace. A dirt path remembers what passed over it. Where the foot landed. How heavy the weight was.
There are gravel paths. They look firm from a distance. But step on one and it's different. The pebbles roll. The foot slips. You walked in confident, and what reaches the sole is something you didn't expect. If you know it's gravel, you can walk it differently — carefully, checking before committing weight to each step. But if you walked in thinking it was solid and your foot finds out otherwise, the moment your body's center wobbles, it's not your foot that shakes. It's your judgment.
There are mud paths. After rain, your foot sinks deep. It takes work to pull each one out. If you know it's mud, you just walk slowly. It's hard, but it's hard in a way you anticipated. But if you stride in thinking the ground is solid and your foot sinks, it's not slow — it's bewildering. The mind reacts before the body. What is this. Why is this happening. It was fine a moment ago.
That day, I walked without looking at what kind of path lay in front of me.
At some point I came to and didn't recognize where I was. The trail was right there, and I was on it. But I didn't know how far I'd come. I hadn't lost the path — I'd lost myself on the path. My feet had been moving on their own, my thoughts had been somewhere else, only my body was there.
The frightening part wasn't being lost. It was that the feet kept moving even when no one was watching. That the legs went on by themselves while the head was elsewhere. That familiar motion works without any awareness. That's what was strangely frightening.
That's how I'd been living, I thought.
More precisely, that's how I'd been working. Sitting down at the same desk, doing the same kind of work, making familiar decisions in familiar ways. At some point, my hands started moving on their own. The work got done even when my head was somewhere else. I'd come to think of that as competence. I'd come to think of becoming-familiar as becoming-good.
But that day on the mountain, standing in the place my feet had unconsciously brought me, I doubted for the first time. Maybe the path I thought I knew well was a path I had never actually looked at.
I had believed my mind was solid.
The belief wasn't unfounded. Life had shaken me many times, and I had held. Holding accumulated, and at some point, the sense that I was someone who could handle this much settled in. Sense becomes conviction. Conviction becomes assumption. At some point, the soundness of my mind was no longer a question — it was a premise. I had never doubted that premise.
Maybe not doubting was natural. You can't go through life suspecting yourself at every turn. You need some belief in yourself to move forward. So the belief itself wasn't wrong. The problem was forgetting when the belief was made, and under what conditions.
There's a record, somewhere, of holding through hard times long ago. That record stacked up, and I became someone whose identity was "the one who holds." But back then and now are different conditions. The me who held back then and the me who's standing now are different people. The same me, but a different me. I hadn't been thinking about that.
I walked in believing it was solid ground. But it wasn't. Whether it's a gravel path or a mud path, I still can't tell. It was just a path different from what I had believed. A path where the footprint sank deep. A path where the foot slowly slipped under. From outside, it had clearly looked solid.
There's no shame in being soft. But when something you'd believed to be solid begins to shake, the bewilderment is much larger than simply being soft. It's the belief that's collapsing. There's a difference between the mind shaking and the belief about the mind shaking. The first is just hard. The second is the realization that you'd been mistaken about yourself.
I thought about this on the way down.
Even the same path can be solid at one moment and gravel at the next. One rainfall and it becomes mud. A path is not still. The path can stay the same, but when the weather and time around it change, what reaches the sole changes too.
The path I'd walked was like that.
When I first stepped onto it, it was solid. At least, that's how it felt. Others before me had packed the ground, and which footsteps to follow was clear. What to study, which tools to use, what decisions to make — someone had already walked the path enough. Footprints didn't remain, but that felt like proof of solidity. Everyone was walking on top of it.
But at some point, the feeling under my soles started to change.
In places I'd believed solid, gravel rolled. In places I'd thought familiar, my foot slipped. The same path became a different path. More precisely, the path didn't change — the conditions around it did. New tools every day. Yesterday's working method doesn't work today. Five years of accumulated competence wobbles in front of a six-month-old tool. AI has started writing code, and it's turning the place I'd long called solid ground into gravel.
I haven't gotten weaker. The path has changed.
But getting weaker and the path changing arrive at the same sensation. The foot wobbles. The center collapses. "This isn't the path I knew" — the bewilderment lands the same way. Whichever the cause, what touches the sole is the same gravel.
That's why people feel similar shakings around similar times. Not because they've grown weak, but because the path has changed. The shaking itself isn't shameful. But not being shameful doesn't mean it isn't frightening. Only after looking down at your feet do you realize. You didn't really know what kind of path you were standing on.
I know this piece doesn't touch a single line of code. I just wanted to ask, of someone sitting in front of a screen — have you ever stepped on gravel in a place you thought was familiar? Has the belief that you were doing well ever shaken once? What you'd long believed solid — was it perhaps just something you'd never thought to question?
The sun was almost down when I made it back.
I walked the same path twice — once going up, once coming down. But coming down, the path felt different. The same dirt, the same gravel, the same mud, but what reached the sole was different. When the direction changes, the same path becomes a different path.
What I learned that day, in the end, was one thing. What kind of path lies ahead is not something I get to decide. Whether it's solid, gravel, or mud — you find out only by walking it, and even then, you can't rest. Today's solidity is not tomorrow's solidity. Just because you stepped on gravel yesterday doesn't mean it'll be gravel today. The same path is a different path on different days. What weight to walk it with — that, and only that, is what I get to decide.
A solid path isn't a good path. A packed path isn't a safe path. On any path your foot can sink. On any path your mind can shake. The only difference is whether you walk it knowing the shaking, or knowing nothing at all.
So let me ask once more.
What kind of path are you standing on now?
And with what mind are you walking it?
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