AI is an extinction-level event for your rules of thumb

AI is disrupting the accumulated heuristics and rules of thumb that experienced engineers rely on. Drawing on Marc Brooker, Kent Beck, and others, the author reflects on how roughly 90% of current engineering skills may become obsolete while 10% — judgment, vision, managing complexity — become exponentially more valuable. The uncomfortable reality is that senior engineers carry miscalibrated priors they can't easily identify, while juniors may actually have an advantage because they haven't built up the wrong instincts. The author describes the personal challenge of distinguishing legitimate intuition from outdated muscle memory when working with AI tools.