Yet another thought piece about LLMs. I know. Bear with me. This is an attempt to put words around something I think most developers are experiencing right now but haven't had time to make sense of. Programming with LLMs is genuinely useful and genuinely destabilizing. These two things coexist. If we pretend the second one isn't happening, we will all burn out. At Pydantic , we build tools that developers use to validate data , build AI agents , and observe what their systems are doing in production. We are, quite literally, in the business of making LLM-powered software more reliable. And we are also having a weird time. This isn't a thinkpiece about whether AI will replace programmers. It's not a doomer essay and it's not a hype piece. It's an honest account of what it feels like to be a developer right now, from someone inside it, and some thoughts on what might actually help.…