A month away

I took a month off for the birth of my first child. Becoming a parent is already a strange enough shift in perspective. Having it happen while software engineering feels like it’s changing underneath me has made this a surreal month.

I’ve also been building things for my own life: Mina, a shared newborn log; tools that help coding agents remember their work; software for making music. These projects give me somewhere concrete to put the excitement. There’s something satisfying about needing a tool and being able to make it.

But that excitement comes with a question I can’t quite shake.

So much of my career has involved building software that helps other departments get their work done. Now the work of building that software is itself becoming easier to automate. It feels like a loop closing. If this reaches across engineering, accounting, operations, and everything between them, what happens to the white-collar jobs built around that work?

I don’t know how much of that feeling is foresight and how much is fear. Automating a task isn’t the same as replacing a person. Still, becoming a parent makes the future harder to treat as an abstract technical question.

I’m excited to keep building. I’m also thinking differently about the world these tools will help my child grow up in.