If you started your career more than ~2-3 years ago, you were trained on a completely different game. Clear abstractions, ownership, careful iteration, all that. That muscle memory is actively hindering you; preventing you from succeeding.

The people coming up now don't have that baggage. They never internalized "write the code yourself" as the default. They think in terms of spawning systems, letting things run, checking outcomes. It's way closer to managing a process than engineering in the traditional sense. And yeah, that shows up in what gets shipped. A 21-year-old will brute force 20 directions in parallel with agents and just pick what works. Someone more "experienced" will spend that same time trying to design the "right" approach up front. By the time they're done thinking, the other person has already iterated past them.

It's kind of unsettling is how basically all of these "senior instincts" are now liabilities. Caring about perfect structure, being allergic to randomness, needing to understand every layer before moving forward, etc. used to be strengths. Now they just slow you down.

You can already feel the split forming. Younger builders are comfortable letting systems do things they don't fully understand. Senior engineers keep trying to pull everything back into something legible and controlled, kneecapping themselves. That gap is not small.

What I'm seeing in my circle of founders and CEOs is that they're slowly laying off these older devs (cutoff age is around 24yrs) and replacing them with fresh, young talent, better suited for this new agentic era. From their reports the velocity gains are insane; and it compounds. Basically, these older folks are still doing polynomial thinking in an exponential landscape. They are dinosaurs slated for extinction.