there's a funny schism in the mountain biking community over e-bikes. lots of non-e-bikers dislike having e-bikes on the trail for whatever their reasons are. e-bikers push back that there's nothing necessarily different about them and there are, in fact, more benefits. i.e., i can go further and see cooler places than you.
evolutions in categories, industries, and disciplines are often seen as revolutions.
humans, according to our nature, create in-groups and out-groups.
in the case of software development, i'm an e-biker.
i got into software development in the last ~year because i admire the systems thinking and the infinite creativity and personalization that comes through software. you can make anything you want. or, as x/twitter says, you can just do things.
and, wouldn't you know it, in the last few months AI has electrified software development and made it accessible to the "normies" like me.
there's at least a casual skepticism from traditional developers that normies can just stand stuff up and build businesses out of it. they're playing their part, though. there should be a tension, a thing to fight against, for the normies to push past.
of course, we're all just standing on the shoulders of bits.
and after many attempts, i've gotten my first thing online that people have signed up for. i have users. i'm a steward of my software and i need to develop it.
so does that make me a software developer? i'm not sure. what's the self-accepting moniker of an e-biker? are they a mountain biker or an e-biker, and are those essentially the same? probably.
for me, i find it useful to not really worry about the label and just build.