I have been writing code for a long time — before AI entered the room, and well after it did. And somewhere between those two eras, I noticed something that had nothing to do with the technology itself. AI didn’t just change how we work. It revealed who we are.
Before any of this, when we were building software as a proper team, personality was impossible to hide. There was no algorithm to blur the edges, no shortcut to disappear behind. You watched your colleagues think in real time, saw their habits and rhythms pressed into every deadline and decision. Over the years, I began to notice the same characters appearing on every team I worked with.
There was always The Mood Guy — the one whose output was tied directly to how he woke up that morning. He’d deliver work either days early in a burst of inspiration, or fashionably late after a quiet internal storm. He almost never hit the scheduled date, but he was usually worth the wait. What struck me most was that this type was often the sharpest mind in the room.
Then there was the person I came to think of as The One Who Needed the Speech. Every two or three days, this colleague needed a real, invested conversation — a full morale injection — just to keep moving. Skip the check-in and the silence that followed was total. It wasn’t laziness. It was a genuine dependency on human fuel.
There was also The Needy One, who needed praise the way a fire needs air. This person loved attention, loved being recognised, and had a habit of correcting everyone around them — not always to improve the work, but to establish their place in the room. Take away the recognition and the performance quietly collapsed.
And then, holding everything together, was The Balance — the quiet anchor every team had but rarely appreciated. This person understood each personality around them, absorbed the friction between them, and kept the whole thing from falling apart. They almost never got the credit they deserved.
These were messy, human, entirely recognisable dynamics. You could see them clearly because there was nowhere to hide. Everyone had to show up with their full brain and carry their share of the weight.
Then AI arrived, and the stage changed completely.
The old personalities didn’t disappear — they transformed. And in some ways, the new versions were harder to deal with.
The first type I started noticing was what I call The Later Guy. There’s an old saying our elders used to repeat: when something becomes available everywhere, people stop valuing it. I saw this happen with the internet — as information became free and effortless, the drive to learn quietly softened. AI triggered the same pattern. This person got access to a tool that could produce results in seconds, and so everything became something to do later. The deeper problem is what that costs him. Before, even when he worked late, he was wrestling with the problem himself — grinding through it, building something real in his mind. Now the delay comes without the struggle, and the struggle was where the growth lived.
The second type is The Road Runner — and this one genuinely concerns me. This person handed everything to AI. Not some things. Everything. They never tested the output personally, never questioned it, never paused to ask whether it actually solved the problem. Ask them a direct question and they’ll check with AI before answering you. The tool became a replacement for thinking rather than a partner to it.
The third type is the most quietly fascinating: The Disingenuous One. This person talks loudly and often about how much they distrust AI, how dangerous it is, how they want nothing to do with it. And then, in private, they use it constantly — sometimes more than anyone else. The resistance is a performance.
And finally, there’s still The Balance — the same person from before, doing the same thankless work, just with a harder job now. They’re not only managing personalities anymore. They’re quietly checking behind everyone to make sure the AI-generated work is actually correct, that nothing important slipped through, that the team’s output still holds up.
What strikes me, looking across both eras, is that AI didn’t create new personalities. It acted like a magnifying glass held up to the ones that were already there.
But the one thing that has genuinely changed — the skill that has quietly become the most important thing in this field — is the ability to listen carefully, read a problem clearly, and communicate precisely what you need. Understand the problem and discuss the way to solve it make you really valuable person. Working with AI demands real articulation. You have to understand your problem well enough to explain it, and understand the answer well enough to judge it.
That, more than anything else, is what I hope people begin to take seriously. The tool is powerful. But the thinking behind it still has to be yours.