Change is the law, AI is the catalyst

New year, new attempt at reading The Daily Laws by Robert Greene. The January 6 entry, “Change Is the Law”, immediately caught my attention:

[…] Change is inevitable, particularly in such a revolutionary moment as ours. Since you are on your own, it is up to you to foresee the changes going on right now in your profession. You must adapt your Life’s Task to these circumstances. You do not hold on to past ways of doing things, because that will ensure you will fall behind and suffer for it. You are flexible and always looking to adapt. If change is forced upon you, you must resist the temptation to overreact or feel sorry for yourself.

Read that again as a developer in early 2026, watching coding agents get better by the week.

This is our revolutionary moment. Pandora’s box has been opened. There’s no going back.

I’m all in. With AI, I finish what I start. I write tests I used to skip. I debug in minutes, not hours. I’ve ported entire libraries to other languages. And I vibe-code tools in an afternoon.

Plenty of good engineers are still wary though, for valid reasons. I’ve seen it: AI can be confidently wrong and quietly add risk. Used carelessly, it creates debt fast; used deliberately, it compounds.

The agents are improving quickly. Teams (and especially solo builders) are adopting them anyway, so I’m learning to work with them deliberately instead of pretending they’ll go away.

But adapting doesn’t mean abandoning what you know. Greene continues:

Before he became the great boxing trainer, Freddie Roach was forced to retire from boxing. He instinctively found his way back to the ring because he understood that what he loved was not boxing per se, but competitive sports and strategizing. Thinking in this way, he could adapt his inclinations to a new direction within boxing. Like Roach, you don’t want to abandon the skills and experience you have gained, but to find a new way to apply them. Your eye is on the future, not the past.

Boxing was the vessel; strategizing and competition were the fire. The vessel can change without killing the fire.

For many developers, the fire was never writing code. It was building, problem-solving, and shipping. The vessel is changing. The fire doesn’t have to.

Salvatore Sanfilippo gets it:

Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched.

I use AI daily. I enjoy most of it. I build more of what I want, faster.

My eye is on the future, not the past. Where’s yours?