"Find Your Niche": How Job Insecurity and AI Pushed Me to Start Building
In my last post, I laid out a personal manifesto on why I’m building in public. It all boils down to a philosophy of constant learning. But philosophy needs a direction. This is the story of how I found mine.
It started with a slow-burning frustration. My day job was fine, but I felt stagnant. The tech world was shifting under my feet with the emergence of AI, layoffs were becoming commonplace, and the future felt uncertain. I was working hard, even on leave days, but for what? I felt like I was running in place.
My friend Abhijith (Tovi) and I would have endless discussions about it. He’s always on the bleeding edge of AI news, and our conversations were a mix of excitement and tension. We saw firsthand how new tools could turn a month of work into a week, or a week into a day. The conclusion was unavoidable: the jobs of legacy software engineers are at risk. The only strategy is to go with the tide—to learn to use these new levers.
On March 6, 2025, after one of these talks, the feeling crystallized. I walked over to my whiteboard and wrote three words that stared back at me for days: “FIND YOUR NICHE.”
It was a command to myself. I needed to find a project—a focus area—that would not only keep me relevant but also reignite that “kick” of learning that I thrive on. I needed a problem to solve that was entirely my own.
I spent days thinking about what that niche could be. The answer, it turned out, wasn’t in some new, abstract technology. It was hidden in the messy details of my own life.
The search for a niche began with identifying a problem worth solving. In the next post, I’ll share the real-life, disorganized mess that became the perfect inspiration: my life in spreadsheets and checklists.