There’s a concept in existentialist philosophy called “thrownness.” Heidegger introduced it in 1927: you didn’t choose your circumstances. You woke up mid-story, in a world with rules you didn’t write, and now you have to make sense of it. No manual. No appeals court.
The idea sat in academic philosophy for two decades. Then came the collapse of the mid-century order. The French existentialists - Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir - brought these concepts to mass attention in the years after 1945, when the old social structures that had organized European life were discredited or destroyed. Monarchy, church, empire, assumed moral order. Sartre’s public lectures drew thousands. Suddenly people had to construct meaning rather than inherit it, and there was a philosophy that described exactly that condition: you are radically free, and that freedom is terrifying.
I think the AI disruption is creating a similar moment in professional life. Not at the same human cost, but with a similar texture. The practices that anchored careers for decades are suddenly negotiable. Agile, Scrum, the user story as unit of work, the sprint as rhythm of delivery. These weren’t natural laws. They were responses to specific problems in a specific context. And that context is shifting under our feet.
The usual response to this kind of disruption is to grab for certainty. Find the next framework. Adopt “AI-native Agile.” Read the thought leaders, get certified, optimize for survival. This makes sense. When the ground moves, you want something solid.
But there’s another response worth considering: notice that you’re free.
This isn’t my first experience of being thrown. I was a teenager in Romania in 1989, and I watched an entire social order collapse overnight. The groundlessness was real. So was the freedom. You learn that the scripts people follow aren’t load-bearing in the way you assumed. When they stop working, you get to decide what comes next.
The AI disruption is smaller in stakes but similar in kind. The inherited practices are suddenly wet, moldable, not yet ossified into the next orthodoxy. And that’s rare. Most of your career, you operate within structures that were settled before you arrived. You can optimize within them, but you don’t get to question them.
Right now, you can.
I’ve been spending time thinking about what software development methodology looks like when every step is AI-imbued. Not just coding assistance, but requirements gathering, analysis, architecture, testing, documentation. If a business analyst produces user stories using an LLM and a developer ingests them into their own LLM, is the user story still the right work product? Or is it a compatibility artifact between two contexts that no longer need translation?
I don’t yet know the answer. And that’s the point. The thing is still wet. I’m not equipped to define the next era, and neither are you, probably. But you and I can think from first principles again.
It is the “unbearable lightness” of the new era. For decades, our professional identity was tied to “proof of effort.” Value was correlated with difficulty; we knew we were doing something real because it was hard. We fought the compiler, we manually laid the bricks, and that struggle anchored us. Now, the friction is gone. The code arrives instantly, dissolved of its difficulty. When the effort disappears, you are left with something much scarier: the naked responsibility of deciding what is worth building.
Yet so much of today’s commentary on AI is instrumental. How to use it. How to profit. How to avoid displacement. That framing treats the disruption as a problem to solve. But there’s something else available if you’re willing to look up: the experience of operating without a playbook. The strange satisfaction of not knowing what the rules are because the rules are being written. Thrownness.
The existentialists had a term for rejecting that freedom: bad faith. Pretending you don’t have choices when you do. Clinging to inherited structures because the freedom (or collapse) is too uncomfortable. Telling yourself, “I’m just following the methodology,” when the methodology was someone else’s answer to someone else’s constraints.
I’m not suggesting you’ll become a visionary. The world will eventually settle into a new order, and there will be winners who defined it, and most of us won’t be them. That’s fine. That’s not the point.
The point is that right now, things are open. You’re not stuck into a lane that was drawn before you arrived. The user story doesn’t have to be the unit of work. The sprint doesn’t have to be the rhythm. The PM-to-engineering handoff doesn’t have to look like a PRD. The right answer is still out there, and you get to participate in finding it.
You might not invent the future, but you have the chance, briefly, to think for yourself in a window where that thinking still matters. To exercise the freedom instead of fleeing from it.
That’s worth something. Not monetarily but existentially.