This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
There's a palpable feeling of anxiety in developer communities right now...
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I love this sentence you used in your closing remarks: Embrace your interdisciplinarity, lean into it.
I find the notion very exciting that disciplines in humanities have a direct role to play in programming with AI today with linguists helping craft optimal prompts and philosophers employed to help define AI models, as well as many other use cases.
Yes indeed! There's a reason why the Comparative Literature folks took 3+ years more than we did to earn their degrees...because interdisciplinary studies is HARD but also incredibly rewarding. If CS-leaning students today ask me what they should major in, I try to convince them to look at the concept of 'CS+X' - CS + biology, CS + linguistics...there's real power there.
This hits home. I help companies integrate AI and the pattern is always the same, the most technical people aren't the ones who get the most out of it. It's the ones who can clearly explain what they need. Came to data with no CS degree myself, so that resonates. Does this shift feel different from previous ones you've lived through, or is it the same grief cycle playing out faster?
I think the grief cycle is the same, the difference is that in CS domains, people were told that this was a sure way to acquire material security, whereas in other disciplines, we knew we were taking a risk and often had a pot boiler behind the scenes. So the shock is greater and more intense. I was always pretty sure I could at least get a certificate to teach grade school French.
The Ubi Sunt framing is brilliant — it reframes what feels like a uniquely modern crisis as something humans have processed for a thousand years. What strikes me is that the pivot from humanities to tech you describe mirrors what's happening within tech now: the "just code" era is giving way to the "understand the system" era. I've found that the developers who struggle most with AI tools aren't the ones with weaker coding skills — they're the ones who never developed the habit of articulating what they want before jumping into how. That's fundamentally a humanities skill: close reading, clear specification, knowing your audience. Do you think CS programs should require a humanities minor, or is that too radical a restructuring for universities to absorb right now?
At this point, I think that people should be obliged to either double major, or major and minor in something humanistic. At the very, very least, people should be required to take ethics classes. And we need to stop categorizing people as “techies versus fuzzies” like they do it Stanford, which is just obnoxious.
The framing around leaning into your human-ness rather than racing to out-AI the AI is the right one. The tools are genuinely useful but the people getting the most from them are the ones who bring something to the table the model cannot synthesize - taste, context, judgment about what actually matters in a given situation. That is still a human thing, at least for now.
The Ubi Sunt parallel is such a powerful framing for what developers are feeling right now. I went through a similar (though less literary) version of this — I spent years deep in performance marketing infrastructure, building systems that automated away tasks that used to take entire teams. The anxiety from the people whose roles shifted was real, but the ones who leaned into understanding the why behind those systems rather than just the how ended up thriving.
What resonates most is your point about interdisciplinarity. I've been building a large-scale financial data site (89K+ pages, 12 languages) and the architecture decisions that matter most aren't really about code anymore — they're about information design, content strategy, understanding how humans actually search for and consume financial data. The humanities-trained brain is surprisingly well-suited for that kind of systems thinking.
Curious: as someone who bridged the humanities-to-tech gap early, do you think the current generation of career-switchers has it easier or harder than you did in the early 2000s? The tools are more accessible but the pace of change feels relentless.
I think folks have it MUCH harder than we did. Back in the 2000s, if you could type and knew a bit of syntax, you could get a job. Now the job market is just awful, and I fear for the next generation. It's why I find my happy place amongst students! We need to support them as much as we can!
I think the real shift is that AI is separating the thinkers from the executors. If all you bring to the table is syntax, yes, AI replaces you. But if you can see the whole picture — what to build, why it matters, how to ship it — AI becomes your superpower. I have been using ChatGPT to build digital products and the bottleneck was never the AI. It was knowing what the market actually needs.