Looking back at 2025, I am really proud of my work.

Read more here

Introduction

I am a seasoned software engineer. You can guess my age if you look at my CV.

Everywhere I look, I see blog posts and messages about AI and coding agents.

Will they take over my job? How should I be looking at this subject at my age and with the experience that I have acquired over the years?

The Way I Think

Today, I have a specific way of thinking.

When I look back in history, people thought much differently than I think today.

Not only that—when I look at how they thought, I find it quite strange, even unacceptable to me.

What changed the way people think, from how they thought in the past to how they think today, is technology.

It’s technology that changed the way I think today.

Example: Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei proved using his telescope that Earth was not the center of the universe.

Technology is the practical proof of what a mathematician proves on paper. It’s the thing that makes me believe and change the way I think.

I Constantly Question

The way I think is based on strong beliefs sculpted in my mind by hard proofs and practical evidence.

But at the same time, I need to be in constant questioning.

I question my own beliefs and follow the emergence of new technology.

I can’t just keep working with the tools I used in the past when technology brings new tools for me to work with.

If I don’t adapt, I won’t be competitive and will be out of a job soon.

I Unlearn In Order to Learn

But do I have to constantly unlearn what I know in order to learn new things?

Yes and no.

It’s a constant balance between what I know and practice on autopilot, and what is new and will make me more productive and effective if I embrace it.

I understand that over the years, I’ve built a foundation of knowledge that I rely on. But there are times—not often—when I need to challenge this foundation.

Challenging it doesn’t mean it will become completely obsolete.

I need to check whether it’s still as strong as it was. It might have weakened.

This is one of those times, I believe.

Parts of the tools and mentality I’ve been using need reinforcement.

AI and coding agents are the new tools I need to integrate and solidify into my many-years-built foundation to make it strong again.

I Keep My Eyes Open And See

I don’t want to be blind to important changes in technology that affect me.

It’s easy to fall into this mode.

I don’t want that.

Sometimes, when new information reaches us and challenges our beliefs, we act defensively. We hide behind our old beliefs and harden them.

This is not me. I don’t want to be like that. It won’t take me anywhere further. It won’t help me grow as a person or as a professional.

I will fairly judge and evaluate what comes to me. I will embrace new forces that are shaping my life and make them my own powers and strengths.

I Have A Beginner’s Mind With An Expert’s View

Am I an expert?

Yes I am.

I have designed, implemented, and deployed to production numerous products and projects in various business domains.

I have an expert’s view.

But I need to have a beginner’s mind too.

The beginner’s mind will see what is coming.

I need to see what is coming.

I need to see what has already come. It is here.

This is a time of great change, and only my beginner’s mind will see the benefits, engage, and take advantage of it.

As an expert with a beginner’s mind, I will carry out a creative destruction.

I will destroy my old, legacy beliefs about outdated tools to embrace new tools for even more creativity, productivity, and—why not—happiness.

I Temper My Confidence and Strengthen My Humility

I have been confident about my approach, my tools, and the way I’ve addressed software engineering problems.

I still am.

But this confidence doesn’t make me stubborn.

The ingredient of humility makes the combination perfect.

Humility is one of my five values (Honesty - Humility - Empathy - Trust - Kaizen).

Humility challenges my confidence for good reason: to make me stronger and more confident in using and believing in the new that is coming and is unavoidable.

Humility makes me ask for advice from outside objective observers.

It’s not bad to ask. Being in the software industry for so many years and being an expert doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to ask.

I ask because I am humble and I believe in asking.

I ask others, especially younger people, because they have the beginner’s mind.

And that makes me stronger and more confident.

I am Not Looking for a Villain

I understand that people want to be heroes in stories where there is always a villain to fight against.

I don’t do that. I like major scales rather than minor scales in my work.

I am optimistic and I trust (which is another one of my values).

You may think that the coding agent is the villain in your own superhero story.

I don’t see it like that. I don’t want to be a hero in any such story.

The coding agent is my companion, the partner I create with and enjoy the value we bring to humans together.

I Survive In An Uncertain Future

The future is uncertain.

What I can be certain of is myself and how I approach the new technology boom.

With “strong beliefs, weakly held.” [1]

Closing Note

Yesterday, I used the Copilot Coding Agent:

• I assigned an issue to it
• I reviewed its pull request and made comments
• The agent came back with improvements and corrections
• I reviewed again and finally approved the pull request
• I merged it, and it was pushed to production thanks to CI/CD (GitHub Actions)

I am happy I live in the era of this huge technology change.

[1] Taken from Paul Saffro, at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future

Read here how I set up TimescaleDB on AWS:

https://mirror.xyz/panagiotismatsinopoulos.eth/09nsCECzMgVCZk0jcFZbs3DIeTQD7rH6W0IvHzaCsS4

My new blog post about Querying a Daily Stats Table - Postgres

My new blog post about Singleton, Unique Jobs and Concurrency. Tech stack: Ruby on Rails and Sidekiq.

I have published a new blog post about how I annotate SQL queries with application source code location, to help troubleshoot slow queries.

Title: SQL Query Annotation

I have published a new blog post about how I find slow Ruby on Rails HTTP requests.

It will be helpful to you if you work with Ruby on Rails and store your logs to AWS.

Title: Find Long Ruby on Rails Requests

I have published a new blog post about how I optimized a Solidity Smart Contract. I used Yul/Assembly to optimize for gas and storage.

Title: Gas Optimization - Yul/Assembly

Today I worked create-open-frames. Fantastic way to start developing with Farcaster Frames.

I just found some issues on this script and I submitted my PR ;-).

PR - create-open-frames.

Introduction

This is the idea behind Arigatai, a project that dreams to save the gratitude statements in history.

Read my blog post on Mirror here