Navigating the Age of ChatGPT
How ChatGPT Changes Everything?
To understand what ChatGPT is doing, we have to look at what we used to do.
Previously, finding an answer was a manual process: search, filter, click, read, synthesize. The user did the heavy lifting.
ChatGPT inverts this. It doesn’t just retrieve links; it synthesizes answers. It turns a ten-minute research task into a ten-second query.
This matters because nearly every industry is built on connecting people with information.
When you radically increase the efficiency of that connection, you don’t just get a better search engine—you get a societal overhaul comparable to the steam engine or the internet.
What Opportunities Will ChatGPT Bring?
Many worry that AI will destroy jobs. It likely will. But it also obliterates the barriers to entry.
The old rule was: “Great ideas need big teams.” The new rule is: “Great ideas need one person with leverage.”
Today, a single developer acts as a full-stack corporation: AI for coding, Vercel for infrastructure, Stripe for finance.
We are entering the era of the One-Person Unicorn, where small, agile entities can outmaneuver bloated incumbents.
However, this creates a new reality. When the barrier to creation collapses, building a product is no longer a competitive advantage—it’s a commodity. When anyone can build anything, the product itself is not the moat.
The winners of this era won’t necessarily be the best engineers. They will be the ones who master distribution and possess the deepest understanding of their customers’ needs.
Chip is the new oil
While software costs are dropping to zero, hardware costs are not.
We are hitting the physical limits of Moore’s Law. Until quantum computing arrives, computing power is a finite, scarce resource. This makes the companies that control the hardware (and the data centers) the new superpowers.
Just as oil defined the geopolitics of the 20th century, chips define the economics of the 21st. The moats of the future aren’t built on code, but on supply chains, power, and cooling.
The Divide: Active vs. Passive
The biggest risk in the AI era isn’t technological; it’s behavioral.
The gap between the active and the rest will widen, but not because of intelligence. It will be a gap of agency.
Group A will use AI to supercharge their output and learning.
Group B will succumb to the algorithms, trapped in passive consumption and dopamine loops.
The defining skill of the future is not just “coding”—it is the discipline to remain in the driver’s seat.
The Impact of AI on Software Engineers
The high demand and salaries for software engineers were an anomaly of the internet age, lasting only two to three decades.
This was fueled by the unique economics of the web: low marginal costs and powerful network effects.
I don’t believe the profession will disappear, but it will change. Coding is no longer enough; future engineers might handle the entire product lifecycle.
To adapt, I believe there are 3 important things:
Embrace AI: Establish a continuous learning feedback loop and be ready for career transformation.
Experiment: Try low-cost business ventures. AI lowers the barrier for a single person to create a great product.
Invest: Build an investment habit. The rules of capitalism remain unchanged regardless of technological progress.
Focus on the Constants
Although predicting the future is impossible, we can anchor ourselves in what remains unchanged over the decades.
In a rapidly shifting world, several foundations persist:
- Computer Science Fundamentals: The underlying architecture, distributed computing, and network hardware.
- The Capitalist Market: The economic rules of the game.
- The Product Cycle: The eternal need for companies to rapidly release, iterate, and maintain products. The essence of a programmer’s job is creating products, not just writing code.
- Basic Human Needs: Food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, and healthcare.
- Physical Constraints: AI’s undeniable demand for computing power, data, and energy.
For anyone seeking to stay competitive in the job market or discover enduring entrepreneurial ideas, these constants may serve as the starting point.
Don’t chase the framework of the week. Master the underlying forces that drive the machine.
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