Mark Erikson is the author of Mark's Dev Blog and the article "My Thoughts on AI, Part 1: Fears, Opinions, and Mental Journey," a long personal account of moving from fear and refusal around AI coding tools to a pragmatic ai-assisted-software-development workflow.source: mark-erikson-ai-thoughts-part-1-2026.md
His account is valuable because it preserves both sides of the transition: the craft-oriented discomfort with non-determinism, career disruption, social impacts, junior-developer pathways, and AI-generated slop; and the practical evidence that agents can accelerate tests, refactors, performance work, codebase research, tool building, and debugging when guided by an experienced engineer.source: mark-erikson-ai-thoughts-part-1-2026.md
A recurring theme is that deep prior expertise still matters. Erikson argues that AI amplified his intent because he could provide context, judge tradeoffs, redirect failures, and encode deterministic scaffolding around uncertain model output.source: mark-erikson-ai-thoughts-part-1-2026.md
Related pages: ai-assisted-software-development, harness-engineering, personal-agents.