If you have ever worked in a results-driven consulting firm that serves clients across varied domains, you must have noticed the attitude of “just getting things done”. There is nothing wrong with that now, is there? The job gets done, the client is happy, value delivered, and everyone gets paid. Everybody goes home happy and rich. The logic here dictates that the faster we reach the done state, the more value can be generated, albeit incrementally. To that effect, we have a perfect tool. What if there is a piece of technology that allows all of us to - Just Get Things Done?

There is technology that gets things done.

Today, we have the privilege to access information at the tip of our fingers. If not for some unprecedented event, that privilege is here to stay and amplified by Intelligent Inference-based models. The compounding effects of these models to generate information, learn skills, and effectively produce an output that resembles results in an organizational context cannot be ignored anymore. Imagine the average amount of time it takes for you and me to learn a new skill. I, for one, who started my career back in the early 2000s, was excited to learn scripting, front-end & back-end libraries, or just new language and different ways to handle semantics, not to mention building something tangible as a weekend project. The thrill was the process of learning rather than the outcome or monetization of the outcome. It was my day job, so the weekends were for fun projects and deep dives. The intelligent agentic models take a fraction of the time to do exactly all of this while I am sat here with an existential crisis.

The crisis of identity is familiar yet entirely unprecedented.

I am a millennial. I guess that is very clear so far. I have grown up dreaming about being the chosen one who fights the agents and saves the whole wide world of web and more. Not for once did I ever imagine being the one sitting in the driver’s seat for the renaissance of the agentic software engineering era. As it is with most of the millennials who started working in the early 2000s, I also had the notion that the era of software would keep churning the big bucks and interesting avenues to explore, never having to reflect and ponder the whys and why nots of accomplishing something and the consequences of the present work on the future. Now, it seems like the future has snuck up on me. I am equal parts complicit and shocked to see that I have reached this stage.

The stage of irrelevancy is rare but often brings change.

I try to keep my existential crisis in check by updating my website and LinkedIn profile, my blog and newsletter, often cursing the advent of new technology, sometimes giving in to the curiosity. There are days when it feels like the change is around the corner, and then the corner turns into another blind alley; the process continues. After 20 years of daily calls, stand-ups, production calls, triage meetings, and retrospectives, life currently feels halted, awaiting the next instruction- a prompt may be- to nudge me in the right direction. Today, the outcome matters more than the process; for that, I need to change the way I represent myself, let my work speak for its achievements, what was done rather than how. The knowledge gap is receding faster than the skill can build something tangible and meaningful. The harness holds strong, so far, as everything I know, in this short stint as a software professional, comes down to this - Everything works in a recursive loop. Even this new challenge from an agentic being threatening to be sentient. As the tide turns into the new age of software, I ask myself - Am I a process or an outcome guy? The answer may not be obvious, yet searching for it is enough to keep me going.

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