I’ve been quiet on this blog for about three years.
When I last wrote here regularly, I was a technical project manager, reading every leadership book I could find, like John Maxwell’s, Ego Is the Enemy or Peopleware trying to figure out how to help my team, how to become someone worth following. It was a good season. Focused. Clear. I knew I needed to become a better tech lead, a better project manager. I was focused at work while listening leadership books on the commute.
Then life accelerated. I left that role — and that company, which had a culture that was quietly draining everyone in it — to go back to being a developer. A few months later I watched a demo of ChatGPT. It was December 2022.
I was speechless.
The people around me weren’t. “It makes mistakes,” they said. “Companies will never accept it – data privacy, IP theft.” And they were right, in the short term. But all I could think was: yet. All of those objections were true yet. And I’ve spent the two and a half years since watching every one of them slowly stop being true.
Meanwhile, life kept moving at full speed. New job. Got married. A mortgage. A baby. The kind of life changes that rearrange your priorities whether you want them to or not.
So I didn’t write. I watched. I learned. I stayed curious in the background while also, somehow, building things.
Here’s what actually happened at work.
For most of 2023 and 2024, AI at my company was mostly talk. Enthusiasm from management. Demos. The occasional Copilot suggestion that was almost right and needed fixing. Companies didn’t allow us to use third party code from chatbots like Chat GPT for security concerns. Everybody knew about what AI can do with coding, some used it more than others, but things remain mostly the same: same interview process, same questions asked, same tools we used day-to-day as developers, same way of learning and getting certifications, same way of estimating and same deployment processes.
Then mid-2025 arrived and something shifted. Copilot with agent mode landed inside our organization. And I want to be honest with you about what that felt like, because I think a lot of senior developers are feeling the same thing and not saying it out loud.
It was night and day.
Not “oh this is a nice autocomplete”, but genuinely different. Agent mode generates code, runs your tests, reads the errors, fixes them, runs again. It navigates codebases it’s never seen, finds relevant files across repos you didn’t know existed, explains patterns you weren’t familiar with. Tasks that would have taken me a morning now take twenty minutes.
And I’m a senior developer with years of experience. This isn’t replacing junior developers who write slow, uncertain code. It’s replacing the process that all of us use: the careful Google search, the Stack Overflow archaeology, the slow translation of an answer into your specific context. That process is largely gone now.
So yes. I’m still concerned. Not in a very bad way, but in a “the ground is genuinely moving and I need to pay attention” way.
Here’s what I’m actually doing about it.
I’m not pretending everything is fine. I’m also not catastrophising. I’m building.
I keep asking myself: what would a .Net developer do in these fast moving times in order to get ahead, to stay relevant. With all this tools at our disposal now, what do we need to focus on to be more valuable to our employers and what is the best way in which we can prepare for interviews?
I’m using AI tools at work seriously – not to replace my thinking but to understand where the leverage is and where experience still matters. I’m learning what I can’t afford not to know: system design, cloud architecture concepts, how to actually direct these tools instead of just reacting to them.
And I’m building on the side. Starting with this blog. I have .NET interview prep notes I’m turning into something useful for other developers. I’m building a small C# MCP server that connects an AI assistant to my Notion notes and I’ll write every step of it here, including the parts that don’t work first time.
This blog used to be about leadership books. It still will be – I have half a dozen reviews sitting in draft that I want to finish. But it’s also going to be about this: what it actually looks like to be a working .NET developer in 2026, trying to stay relevant, stay useful, and build something real in the margins of a busy life.
Not from a position of having figured it out. From the middle of figuring it out.
If that’s where you are too, stick around.
