I’ve been a programmer for a long time. Long enough that “I know how to build things” quietly became part of how I answered the question who am I, even though I never said it out loud like that.
Then my graphic designer — a genuinely talented visual person, not a developer, never claimed to be one — showed me something she’d built. Working code. Functional. Using AI to “vibe code” her way through a problem I would have approached with, well, years of training and a certain amount of pride.
My first reaction wasn’t admiration. It was something smaller and less flattering. A kind of quiet defensiveness. Wait. That took me years to learn. That’s supposed to be the hard part.
I sat with that reaction longer than I’d like to admit.
The honest truth
Here’s what I eventually had to be honest about: it wasn’t really about the code. The code worked fine either way. What stung was the quiet demotion of something I didn’t even realize I was holding onto — the sense that knowing how to do this was part of what made me, me.
Turns out that’s not a shallow thing to feel. Psychologists have long pointed out that competence is a genuine human need, not just an ego trip — the sense of “I am capable” sits right alongside things like autonomy and belonging in what makes people feel okay. So the sting was real. I just had it aimed at the wrong target.
The target wasn’t AI. It was the size of the house I’d built on top of “I’m good at this.”
An identity crisis
Here’s the uncomfortable part: identity built on being-the-expert was always going to be fragile. Not because AI is special, but because anything built on “I am the one who can do this” is one new tool, one younger colleague, one bad year away from being tested. AI just happened to be this decade’s stress test. It could have been something else entirely, and the lesson would’ve arrived the same way — as a small, unwelcome surprise.
There’s a sociological point buried in here too: the whole idea that “what do you do?” is basically the same question as “who are you?” is a fairly modern habit, not a timeless truth. We didn’t always identify ourselves so tightly with our craft. We just got used to it.
Thomas Merton — a monk who spent a good portion of his life thinking about exactly this — put it more sharply than I could:
“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.”
I’m not a monk, and this isn’t a spiritual conversion story dressed up as a tech post. But I’d be lying if I said the discomfort of watching a non-programmer build working software didn’t ask me the same question Merton was asking his readers, just in a more modern, more mundane costume: if the thing you built your identity on got a little less impressive tomorrow, what would actually still be true about you?
Where this leaves me
I don’t have a tidy answer. I don’t think this is a post that’s supposed to end with one. What I have instead is a genuine, ongoing question I’m going to be sitting with as I write the rest of this series: if not from expertise, output, or being needed — where do we actually root our sense of self?
I don’t know yet. I’m not sure most of us fully do.
But I’d rather ask that question honestly, than pretend I resolved it in the time it took my designer to finish her prototype.
