Software Engineering in the Age of AInxiety

You won’t be replaced by AI; you’ll be replaced by someone who is using AI.

Everyone working in any field even loosely adjacent to tech has heard this phrase hundreds of times over the past few years, in X threads and LinkedIn posts and workplace conversations. It’s repeated like a mantra, a quiet catechism grasping for hope in a rapidly changing world.

There is a tangible tension in the air of the software world. On the surface, everything looks productive. Tools are getting better. Models are getting smarter. Entire features emerge from a simple prompt. Junior engineers punch well above their weight, and Senior engineers operate as self-contained tactical units.

And yet, beneath the surface and behind the hopeful slogans there is something else. A low, persistent hum on anxiety. I call it AInxiety.

Being Honest About The Changing World

Saying we won’t be replaced by AI feels hopeful, empowering. But if we are being honest, we know it is temporary.

The trajectory we are witnessing, every morning when we download the latest update to Cursor, is not simply that engineers who fail to embrace AI will be replaced. The deeper question is whether the craft of software engineering itself is being abstracted and compressed away, and if we are building and using the tools that enable our own irrelevance. As I write this, just today the world learned that Block has laid off nearly half of its staff, citing AI as the reason thousands of their employees have become redundant – and CEO Jack Dorsey is confident that he is merely ahead of the curve in a trend that will sweep the world in the coming months.

For many of us, software engineering is not simply a job. It is how we think. How we approach new problems. The mechanism by which we impact the world and help people. How we justify our place in the economy, in the world. It is a core part of who we are.

For myself, software engineering was how I escaped the grind of blue-collar hard labor. It represented an opportunity to prove to the world – and to myself – that I was capable of solving complex problems in the market, making myself a valuable cog in the machine of our economy. And I truly love the craft. I have always been fascinated with the web browser, and building beautiful interfaces has been the greatest professional joy of my life thus far.

So the real anxiety is not simply about work anymore than it was for the saboteurs of the industrial revolution when the world moved in from hand-threaded textiles. It is about meaning and purpose.

What happens when the skills that made you valuable become commoditized? What happens when your competitive edge becomes the default capabilities of any standard computer? I suppose it is ironic that the engineers who have automated so many other tasks are now being abstracted away ourselves.

I am not anti-AI. I use these tools daily. They are truly extraordinary. They have enabled me to build software I would have never thought was possible before.

But I also believe that pretending not to feel the sense of what is impending is dishonest.

This is my attempt to explore these feelings, honestly, openly, and without hysteria, and to ask a deeper question: in an age where intelligence is cheap and creating is automatic, what remains that is uniquely human?

Anxiety & Courage

The first time I read Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, I found it almost amusing that he referred to his own time – the Cold War era – as “the age of anxiety.” As one of the inheritors of the world of the economic uncertainty, social media algorithms, and now artificial intelligence that has come to define the beginning of the twenty-first century, I had often thought romantically about the decades before in which life seemed so much simpler and slower-paced.

Nonetheless, Tillich offers much insight into how humans grapple with times of great uncertainty.

For Tillich, there is a key difference between anxiety and fear. Fear has an object that can be pointed to and explained. Anxiety goes deeper. Anxiety is the awareness of possible nonbeing, the sense that the foundations of our own reality can disappear.

In the age of AInxiety, we are not dealing with fear so much as the dread that much of what we have treated as foundational may not be so. It is the realization that so much of what we spend our lives doing, and build our identities around, may have just been a intermediary steps on the journey of humanity’s upward thrust toward building tools that will carry the next phase of our evolution (at least, this is the promise of technology we are sold, but the world of technology is littered with broken promises).

Work Ethic & Meaning

The Protestant work ethic taught the West that work was more than survival. It was vocation, discipline, mastery, productivity. Not utilitarian ideals in an economic sense, but virtues that both build and display character.

Over time, the theological underpinnings faded, but the structure remained under capitalism. We stopped talking about working as service to God, but we kept talking about economic output and excellence. In a sense, the market replaced the church as the place to seek justification. Remove the grounding in faith, and our work has slowly become ultimate – not intentionally, but structurally. And when the ultimate facet of our identity is threatened, anxiety follows, just as Tillich pointed out.

Building As Justification

For me, learning to code was not just a career shift: it was a kind of salvation.

I come from a world where work was measured by physical strain. Software was different. It rewarded deep thought, structure, and clarity. It felt like transcendence, being a part of shaping systems, solving complex problems. Looking back, I can see how tightly I fused identity to that competence. Building software is not just something I do – it is evidence of who I am.

AI destabilizes that evidence. If a model can generate working code from a prompt, refactor it better than I can, and reason across codebases in milliseconds, the threat is not just economic. It is existential.

Courage In The Age of AInxiety

My grandmother, whose life spanned most of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next, once told me that the most significant change she witnessed in her life was the invention of the refrigerator. Before that, she told me, everybody had to make the trek to the supermarket daily to purchase fresh goods for the day. After that, it became a weekly chore – saving an hour or so of time every single day. I think about how, even seeing advancements like the internet and cell phone, what changed her life the most was the refrigerator.

She was placed into history at a moment to witness monumental change, and by the end she was fatigued at how different everything was from the world she was born into. These days, I have a lot of empathy for her. In the span of less than two decades, I’ve seen the world go from grainy and slow-loading videos on a new platform called YouTube, to being able to talk to my computer in English and get working code out of it. I’ve seen platforms go from optimism and connection to ever-present anxiety, and a sense of dread that we are building our own chains.

Tillich tells us that courage is not the absense of anxiety. It is the courage to affirm one’s being in spite of it. Not because the foundations of our identity are guaranteed. They aren’t. But because being is deeper than the structures that temporarily support our existence.

If AInxiety is the awareness that our professional competence, knowledge, and skills are not ultimate and will be automated, then courage is not doubling down on productivity. Neither is it pretending that these tools are harmless, nor cynically dismissing them or wishing them away.

Courage, as Tillich tells us, is the refusal to let our identity collapse when the world shifts around us.

Courage is self-affirmation “in-spite-of,” that is in spite of that which tends to prevent the self from affirming itself.

Identity is deeper than output. Being precedes building. AI may automate our craft, but it cannot automate our being.