InkdownInkdown
Start writing

Yt Trans

15 files·15 subfolders

Shared Workspace

Yt Trans
0 Jobs To 4l Month The Ai Business That Changed My Life

tldr

Shared from "Yt Trans" on Inkdown

════════════════════════════════════════

What Is The Future of Coding With AI?

Mehul Mohan · 21:22 · 2026-06-08

What This Is Actually About

Mehul Mohan (former founder, sold his company, now in Dubai) reflects on how AI has transformed software development — not from a technical tutorial angle, but from a career and psychology perspective. He argues developers face two parallel crises: employment pressure (more tickets, more features, fear of being left behind) and the loss of the "flow state" that made coding joyful, while also offering a framework for navigating the new landscape.

Key Points

AI Has Two Axes: Employment and Engineering

From an employment view, AI increases workload — more tickets, more features to ship, more experiments. Engineers now juggle multiple AI systems (Claude, GPT, MiniaX) and feel pressured to keep up. From an engineering view, AI is like any past technology shift (React, ES5) — it enables learning from existing codebases and revisiting old ideas.

The Layer Framework for Career Navigation
tldr.md
8 Lpa To 55 Lpa In 4 Months No Bs Breakdown Ft Dhairyasheel
tldr.md
Building The Perfect Linux Pc With Linus Torvalds
tldr.md
Claude Mythos Clone Shocks Anthropic And Openai
tldr.md
Don T Let Ai Rob You
tldr.md
English Or Spanish India S Got Latent
tldr.md
From Zero To Senior How I Grew In My Career
tldr.md
How to become 10x smarter
file
How To Learn Ai Engineering In 5 Minutes No Prior Knowledge
tldr.md
Mcp Vs Acp The Two Protocols Every Ai Builder Needs To Know
tldr.md
Optimize Your Ai Quantization Explained
tldr.md
Realistic Advice About Software Dev Right Now
tldr.md
Stop Using Ai For These Things
tldr.md
The Most Talented Man In Ai
tldr.md
What Is The Future Of Coding With Ai
tldr.md

Mohan defines Layer 1 (frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind), Layer 2 (companies tightly using frontier models, e.g., Cursor), and Layers 3+ (companies barely aware of AI). His advice: if you feel stagnant, move toward lower-numbered layers. Ideally aim for Layer 1 or start your own company.

AI Will Surpass Any Specific Hard Skill You Have

Models trained with reinforcement learning and expert-curated environments are improving fast enough that tying your identity to being "the best coder" or "the best front-end designer" is a losing strategy. The speaker has built RL environments himself and asserts specific technical skills will be surpassed.

The Flow State Is Dying

Mohan describes coding's "flow state" — headphones, dark room, fixing bugs — as a joy he has not experienced in 6 months. AI-assisted development (writing prompts, waiting for responses, spinning multiple agents) breaks this entirely. He admits even he defaults to agents and shifts to other tasks, feeling guilt when not using AI.

Taste and Experience Cannot Be Prompted Away

Concrete example: Mohan asked AI to build a Cloudflare R2 bucket for asset upload. AI routed static files through a Cloudflare Worker (paid per request) instead of using the R2 URL directly (free requests, only pay for storage). AI's solution was functional but suboptimal — and there was nothing to stop it. The 10,000+ micro-decisions learned over 10-15 years of coding cannot be encoded in a prompt, system instructions, or even a markdown file.

The Only Asset That Matters Is Bravery

Mohan's core personal conclusion: the defining trait is not intelligence but risk-taking. He sold his company, moved to Dubai, and plans to relocate to SF to be in the AI ecosystem — not because he has it figured out, but because he sees discomfort as a signal of growth.

If You Remember Nothing Else

  • AI solves problems but cannot develop taste — your 15 years of judgment is the only moat left.
  • "Flow state" coding is being replaced by prompt orchestration; the joy many developers entered the field for may not survive.
  • Move toward the frontier (lower layers) or accept that your career growth will slow.
  • If you are not using hundreds of thousands in AI tokens per month, you are not behind — 0.1% of people are.
  • Being brave enough to take the uncomfortable career risk matters more than any specific technical skill.

Watch Out For

  • Cloudflare R2 claim: AI proposed a suboptimal solution (Worker route vs. R2 direct URL) — the speaker claims "there is nothing to stop AI from pointing that out" and that system prompts don't fix this, but offers no example of trying a different model or approach to verify this.
  • No data on "flow state dying": The claim that AI kills flow state is entirely personal anecdote. No evidence is offered that this is universal or irreversible.
  • Layer framework is wholly invented: The "Layer 1/2/3" taxonomy is the speaker's own construct presented as objective career advice.

════════════════════════════════════════