Full-Stack Ownership · · ·

Real technical ability is fading. Worried about AI replacing you? Build real technical depth. LLMs are leverage, a force multiplier, but only if you know what you’re doing. You’re not losing to AI. You’re losing to people who use AI better than you because they actually understand the tech. Get sharper.

This goes way beyond privacy or ideology. As optimization and model alignment get more personal (and more opaque), your only actual safety net is full local control. If you’re building a business, a workflow, or even a habit that depends on a remote black box, you’re not the customer; you’re the product. Full-stack ownership isn’t just to show off. It’s pure risk management.

The future belongs to those who can build, debug, and document, not just rent someone else’s toolchain. Bootcamps don’t cut it anymore.

“Every day these systems run is a miracle. Most engineers wouldn’t last five minutes outside their cloud sandbox.”

Our industry is obsessed with AI hype, most devs have never seen the bare metal, never written a real doc, and never owned their own stack. Meanwhile, the only thing standing between us and our systems’ total collapse is duct tape, a few command-line obsessives, and the shrinking number of people who still know how to fix things when the it all stops working. We’re staring down an industry where the median troubleshooting skill is somewhere between “reboot and pray” and “copy-paste from Stack Overflow”.

So please, stop the doomscroll and quit worrying about being replaced. LLMs amplify you; they don’t substitute for you. The edge is in the hard parts: critical thinking, debugging, taste for clean architecture, putting it all together. That’s not going anywhere. The job is shifting not getting eliminated: more architecture, more security, more maintenance, more troubleshooting. Still deeply human, and still non-trivial to automate.

This is blogpost #3 in my 101 Days of Blogging . If it sparks anything; ideas, questions, or critique, my DMs are open. Hope it gives you something useful to walk away with.

Yesterday morning I hosted an X/Twitter Audio Space on how LLMs, open-source, and the gravitational pull of platform centralization are forcing us all to rethink what it actually means to be a developer. The cloud got us coddled… The cloud was a mistake , and I believe that next decade’s winners won’t be the ones who just ship the most code (LLMs are really good at that BTW), but the ones who get obsessed with understanding, documenting, and actually owning their tools, top to bottom.

Let’s set the scene. Google Cloud outage just crashed the internet. X/Twitter is in full panic mode , Cursor/Claude Code/Windsurf/etc aren’t working anymore. LLMs have become the default code generator, human programming skills are fading. For me, I didn’t even notice the outage until I got online. My local agents, running on my hardware from my basement , kept running.