Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters
Source: Dev.to
Hi, my name is David, and I’m a very good developer. For insane reasons I cannot specify right now, I stopped working in the tech industry. I now work approximately 3 hours a day fundraising for the religious schools of my orthodox congregation. I study Torah at night, where Rachel Imenu (yes, from the Bible) is buried, and like it a lot. I wasn’t laid off because of AI. My story is different.
During my time here calling people and asking them to renew their donations, I started hacking around with stuff. One thing led to another, and I started thinking of an idea. Why can’t I just git add mp3 files, PDFs, or whatever, and just commit and push them? I know, no diffs, and git doesn’t handle that well and so on and so on. But why? The more I thought of it, ideas started popping. Not some extension or a tool with different semantics, the same git semantics and simplicity, just for other files. Ideas kept coming, and I thought about it all day long.
When things started to take shape, I consulted AI and began writing my program. I discovered how easy it was to write code using AI, and from copying and pasting I slowly started to learn about developing more seriously with AI. Cursor IDE was my first, and it amazed me how easy it was to write code, specs, tests (things I was always too lazy to do as a developer), and it was just FUN. AI did all the heavy lifting for me, and I only had to intervene when it was doing silly things, pointing it in the right direction.
I wasn’t a developer anymore; I became an architect. The years of experience came into play. I knew what good code looked like, and I could spot architectural mistakes. I no longer had to meddle with the details—I just had to think of an architecture, weigh subtle alternatives, and make important decisions. I have become a manager of junior programmers, Claude et al. It was amazing. What was even more amazing were the circumstances that led me to it. I have very little money, and for various reasons I cannot be employed right now as a developer. That actually gave me unlimited freedom. I could just program what I wanted, not caring if anyone liked it, would buy it, or whatever.
So, I created bit, which I’m very proud of. It’s still a work in progress, but I have high hopes for it.
Maybe you’re a developer who has not found the right place in the tech industry… Maybe you’re over‑qualified in what you do. Maybe you lost your job because of current trends, or maybe you’re just wondering what your role is in the world of AI development. I want to tell you what I think: AI poses an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to do what you’ve always wanted—write in any language you like and develop that amazing tool you’ve always dreamed of. With AI you can do in weeks what would take months or years, and all by yourself. As a seasoned dev, you can instruct AI to build good and maintainable software. You can design a product, and use skills a manager might not have—reading code, understanding trade‑offs, skimming over code, finding architectural mistakes AI makes (and it still makes them), and guiding it to give very good results.
King Solomon says, “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.” (Ecclesiastes 11:1)
I have the advantage of having nothing to lose. That gives me a lot of freedom. Maybe my story will inspire people to create something, without expecting a return.