Developers aren’t just adapting to AI - we’re grieving. Software development has changed forever, and that’s a kind of loss. Each of us goes through the 5 stages in our own way 👇
🩶 Stage 1 - Denial
- “It’s just another hype cycle.”
- “We had LLMs in the 1950s too.”
- “My job is way too creative for AI.”
🔥 Stage 2 - Anger
- “I write better code than this thing.”
- “It hallucinates!”
- “Stop suggesting console.log()!”
🤝 Stage 3 - Bargaining
- “Maybe I’ll just use it for boilerplate.”
- “It’s OK as long as it’s free.”
- “If I supervise it closely, it’s basically still my code.”
😞 Stage 4 - Depression
- “I can’t believe I’m installing the Copilot extension.”
- “What if my PR gets reviewed by a bot next?”
- “It writes faster than me — and doesn’t complain about Jira.”
🧘 Stage 5 - Acceptance
- “Let me enable this MCP for my emails.”
- “I just asked my AI to write my onboarding doc.”
- “Remember when we thought Stack Overflow was cheating?”
- “Is there an auto-accept option somewhere in settings?”
Any of this sound familiar? Where are you in the five stages right now? 👇
Originally posted on LinkedIn.