Identity Crisis

I am an iOS developer.

Or at least, I used to think that was the answer.

For most of my career, life was simple. I built apps in Swift, lived comfortably inside the Apple ecosystem, got a design, analyzed a feature, wrote the code, reviewed it, shipped it, and moved on to the next thing.

I was not one of those developers who could write everything from memory. I used Stack Overflow. I searched documentation. I copied snippets and adapted them. But I understood what I was building.

And honestly, I felt like a developer.

Then AI happened.

At first, it felt like another tool. A better autocomplete. A faster search engine. A smarter Stack Overflow.

Then it got really good.

The parts of software development that consumed most of my day suddenly became automated. Boilerplate. Mapping code. Repetitive implementation work. Things that once took hours now took minutes.

So I started asking myself a strange question.

If the code is writing itself, then what exactly am I?

The funny thing is that this shift started before AI.

I was already becoming less interested in writing code and more interested in architecture, scalability, maintainability, and understanding what customers actually wanted. AI did not force that transition. It simply accelerated it.

Today, I spend less time writing code and more time thinking about systems. I use AI to generate the repetitive parts while I focus on solving the actual problem.

And somewhere along the way, my definition of software engineering started changing.

Then I got moved to a team focused on agentic workflows and AI driven development. Instead of building product features, I found myself researching how software itself could be built differently.

I was suddenly outside my comfort zone.

And I liked it.

That path eventually led me into harness engineering. I started learning Rust. I started building infrastructure. I started exploring systems programming.

Ironically, I am writing software that feels more engineering focused now than when I was spending my days building application features.

For the first time, I started calling myself a software engineer instead of just a developer.

Not because of Rust.

Not because of AI.

But because I stopped identifying with a specific tool.

Swift was a tool.

Rust is a tool.

AI is a tool.

The real job is solving problems.

Sometimes I wonder if I am becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none.

An iOS developer learning systems programming.

A systems programmer learning AI.

An engineer learning product thinking.

Someone moving across disciplines without fully belonging to any of them.

But maybe that is okay.

Maybe modern engineering is less about defending a title and more about adapting to whatever the problem demands.

The more I learn, the less certain I become about what I am.

iOS developer?

AI engineer?

Systems programmer?

Architect?

Harness engineer?

I genuinely do not know.

And maybe that uncertainty is not a weakness.

Maybe it is the thing that keeps pulling me forward.

Who am I?

Guess we will never know.