Goodbye to Everything That I Knew
It’s funny to stumble upon the digital ghosts of your past self.
I recently ported my old website off a purchased CSS and Jekyll theme I didn’t understand to Hugo. In 2027, I hope to write and share a little more. My old site was published via Github and required me to track drafts in a separate repo.
In digging around old branches and abandoned drafts, I found some relics.
A half-finished draft about methods for parsing json. I wrote it after doing truly nasty data cleaning work on competitor supply chain data my (then) employer purchased during the pandemic.
A port of the SQL murder mystery to dbt 0.22 (!!) structured around acquiring basic dbt skills
Dotfiles with carefully crafted shell commands to save keystrokes and time
A planned post on doc blocks in dbt, to keep common bits of documentation in sync across tables
Like many of my peers in tech, LLMs have radically reshaped how I do my work in the last year. Sometime in January 2026 I did my last ever dbt PR without an agent. Now I run 10 parallel dbt environments and occasionally use them all.
Some days I’m wildly, gleefully excited about what’s now possible. New workflows are unlocking insights with a speed, rigor, and completeness that was previously unimaginable. I spend a lot of my time building the agentic data platform that my teammates use. I’ve built agentic tools that hundreds of people at my company use. I’m steeped in the world of exciting possibilities all day long.
And yet.
And yet.
And yet.
I mourn the craft and deep expertise I spent the first part of my career building.
I spent a lot of time learning how to execute well on details that LLMs now abstract away.
I miss the flow state of actually writing code.
I miss understanding a problem, truly, madly, deeply. I miss an aha moment put together in your own head, not sifted out of a glaze of AI written text.
I miss the magic of live debugging with a coworker, sifting through signals and building understanding together. Now we just meat proxy our agents.
While I was writing this, an agent moved my website for me in the background for $5. Onwards, I guess.