The Ego in the Machine: How I Learned to Stop Competing and Start Leveraging AI
Nobody watches Iron Man and thinks the suit is the hero. 🦾
The suit makes Tony Stark faster, stronger, and capable of flight. But the suit doesn’t decide which city to save. It’s an exoskeleton, not a replacement.
For a long time, I struggled to see AI this way. After spending the last year and a half at Microsoft getting my feet under me in the massive .NET ecosystem, I realized I didn’t have a technical problem with AI. I had an ego problem. 🧠
The “Wait, I Just Learned This” Moment
We’ve all been there. You spend months—maybe years—finally starting to feel comfortable with a stack. You’re finally getting the hang of how Dependency Injection works in ASP.NET Core, or how to write a clean LINQ expression without reaching for the docs every five minutes. 🛠️
Then, a LLM generates that same code in seconds. My first instinct wasn’t “Great, I saved twenty minutes.” It was: “Wait, I just spent so much effort learning how to do that. Is that all it’s worth?”
That sting wasn’t about the tool’s accuracy—it was about my own professional insecurity. I was viewing AI as a competitor for the mechanical parts of my job that I had worked so hard to “master,” rather than a lever for the strategic parts.
Augmentation Over Competition
I had to admit something uncomfortable: The “boilerplate” parts of my job—the stuff I was using as a benchmark for my own progress—are no longer the primary value I provide.
Checking my ego meant realizing that: ✅ Being “the person who knows the syntax” isn’t the final destination of an engineer. ✅ The “human” element is about knowing which problems are worth solving. ✅ Directing the tool is a higher-level skill than competing with it.
AI is a New Domain of Mastery
Once I put my ego aside, I stopped seeing AI as a “cheat code” and started seeing it as a new layer of the stack. 📚
Just as I’m still learning the depths of the .NET CLR or Entity Framework Core, I’m now learning a new discipline: Generative Logic. It’s about being an architect of intent.
Instead of spending my “cognitive budget” on the “How” (the obscure syntax), I’m spending it on the “What” and the “Why.”
- The “What”: What architecture will actually scale this system? 🏗️
- The “Why”: Why are we building this specific feature for the user? 💡
The Bottom Line
I’ve realized that the most dangerous thing in my career isn’t a powerful new tool—it’s the pride that prevents me from picking it up.
Checking my ego at the door didn’t make me less of an engineer. It promoted me. I’m no longer just a builder of code; I’m an architect of output.
Stop trying to race the machine. Start mastering the leverage. 🚀