Chapter 17: Community

The Search for Others Like Me

For six months, I told almost no one about how I was working.

Not my developer friends or my coworkers, and not my family, who would not have understood anyway.

I had found this workflow, agent mode and architectural thinking and AI building entire systems overnight, and it felt like a superpower. It also felt like a secret that might get me judged.

What if other developers thought I was cheating, or thought less of me for leaning on AI this heavily? What if I was the only one working this way, and sharing it would just reveal how weird my process had become?

So I kept quiet.

I would sit in meetings at work and hear developers complain about their velocity. I would see them struggling with problems I had solved by delegating to AI. I would watch them type code line by line and think, “I could show you a better way.”

But I did not, because I could not tell if they would be curious or contemptuous.

The isolation was exhausting. The work was easier than it had ever been, and I had no one to share the discoveries with or debug prompt strategies with, no one to tell me that what I was experiencing was real and not just… I don’t know… some kind of productivity delusion.

What finally broke the isolation was reading.

Somewhere in that stretch I started finding the people who were already talking. Blog posts about agent workflows. Repositories with their CLAUDE.md files committed in the open, and long writeups of overnight runs that went sideways. One post admitted the author did not feel like they were really programming anymore. More like architecting, while the AI implemented.

My heart raced reading that. It was my secret, written down in public by a stranger whose name I do not even remember.

I never wrote to any of them. I just kept reading. One stranger’s template taught me things about my own. Another’s cost-management writeup saved me a bill I never had to pay.

We were not alone.

The strangest thing about this revolution in software development is how quiet it has been. While the world debates whether AI will replace programmers, we are in here finding out that it makes us more human.

We are finding each other.

After months of exploring alone, experimenting with prompts in private and wondering if anyone else feels this same mix of excitement and uncertainty, something is happening. The people working alone are finding each other. The early ones are starting to teach and the skeptics are getting curious. A community is forming around something that did not exist a year ago.

I had been on this journey alone long enough. It was time to find my tribe.

Finding that tribe was harder than it should have been. The resistance is not only about AI. It runs between developers themselves.

We are used to gatekeeping, to secrets being power and to keeping what you know close. And now there is a new layer of fear on top. If I share how I work with AI, am I admitting I need help? Am I giving away the edge that keeps me employed?

I felt this fear personally. The first time I published a post about how I actually work, I hovered over the publish button for a long time. Rewrote the opening twice. Worried readers would think I was admitting incompetence.

The distrust runs deeper than I expected. Developers suspicious of each other’s AI usage. Is that code really yours? Are you a “real” programmer if AI wrote half of it? The old hierarchies feel threatened and they push back.

So when signals do appear, someone sharing a prompt pattern, a repository of conversation templates, they are fragile and often anonymous. Admitting you are working this way, that you do not have it all figured out and are still exploring… that takes courage in an industry built on appearing to know everything.

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You’ve read the opening of this chapter. The full chapter continues in the book.