Nolan, a programmer with a background in linguistics, sums up his current stance on AI: ambivalence.

So there’s my overwhelming feeling at the end of this post: ambivalence. I feel besieged and horrified by what gen-AI has wrought on my industry, but I can no longer keep my ears plugged while the tsunami roars outside. Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday. I honestly don’t know, and I find that terrifying. But there is some comfort in the fact that I don’t think anyone else knows what’s going to happen either.