An Era That No One Knows Again
Chapter 13
Time sped up after passing forty.
When one project ended, the next began, people came and went. Someone became a team lead, and someone quit development. I too changed companies and renewed contracts while continuing to work on development.
At the end of every year, similar conversations came up.
"You're continuing into next year, right?"
At first I took it lightly, but as I aged, the question grew heavier. A long career meant having experience, but it also meant being expensive.
In interviews, I sometimes received questions like this.
"Do you still code directly?"
"Yes."
"You haven't done management?"
After I answered, the other person would nod. I couldn't tell if it was meant kindly or not. Before I knew it, I had more juniors than seniors. It was no longer strange to have a team lead younger than me, or to be asked my opinion in meetings. But when young developers saw old code and said "Why did they make it like this?", time seemed visible before my eyes.
"That was the standard way back then."
"Really?"
What seemed recent to me was history to them.
In the meantime, development became much more systematic. Version control and automated builds, deployment procedures became established, and fewer people randomly accessed production servers. Instead, systems grew larger and had more connections. I still looked at code directly. I explained old systems to new people, found undocumented exceptions, and when problems arose, I checked logs and data first.
Then AI came.
At first, I saw it as a convenient search tool that answered questions. I had already heard many times that the world changes every time a new technology comes out. They said server developers would disappear when cloud came out, and developers wouldn't be needed when no-code came out.
I thought this time would be similar.
But a young developer asked AI about code they had never seen before and brought back working code in minutes. Someone else put in entire documents to summarize, and even had it generate test code and queries.
At first, it seemed like a toy.
Shortly after, it became a convenient tool.
As time went on, I wondered if we could go back to before this existed. The company moved too. AI training appeared, license application notices went up, and the word 'productivity' frequently appeared in meeting materials.
One day, a meeting invitation came through messenger.
Sharing the Direction for Using AI Development Tools
In the attendee list were the team lead, young developers, and my name. On the day of the meeting, I went in a bit early and opened my laptop. People came in one by one, and finally the team lead came in.
I was the oldest.
The team lead turned on the screen.
Agent. Coding assistant. Context. Vector database. MCP.
It seemed like a scene I had seen somewhere before.
"Probably starting next year, the development methodology itself will change a lot."
I remembered the sound of a book dropping on a desk a very long time ago.
Thud.
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And at that moment,
the me at twenty-something
and the me nearing fifty
sat in the same place for the first time.
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