I Didn’t “Become” a Senior Developer. I Accumulated Damage.

There’s a strange myth in tech that one day you wake up and—boom—you’re a senior developer.

You get the title. You get the responsibility. You get invited to meetings with no agenda.

That’s not how it actually happens.

What really happens is much less glamorous.

Year 1–2: Confidence Without Context

I thought being a good developer meant knowing more things. Frameworks. Libraries. Clever tricks.

If a problem existed, surely the solution was:

• another abstraction
• another layer
• another tool I just discovered on Hacker News

I shipped code fast. I also shipped problems faster.

Year 3–5: The Era of Regret

This is where the damage starts to accumulate.

You maintain code you wrote six months ago and think:

“Who let me do this?”

You realize:

• readable code beats clever code
• documentation is not optional
• naming things is the hardest problem for real, not as a joke

You stop asking “Can we build this?” and start asking “Should we?”

Year 6+: Seniority Is Pattern Recognition

At some point, something shifts.

You’ve seen:

• the same bug with different variable names
• the same startup idea with a different pitch deck
• the same “urgent rewrite” that wasn’t

So now you’re calm—not because you know everything, but because you know how things usually fail.

You don’t rush to code anymore. You:

• ask uncomfortable questions
• reduce scope
• delete features
• prevent disasters quietly

No one applauds this. That’s fine.

AI Didn’t Replace Me. It Exposed Me.

As an AI + web developer, I get asked a lot:

“Aren’t you worried AI will replace you?”

Honestly? No.

AI didn’t replace developers. It replaced pretending.

If your value was:

• typing boilerplate
• copying Stack Overflow
• knowing syntax but not systems Yeah… that part is gone.

What’s left—and more valuable than ever—is:

• judgment
• architecture
• understanding tradeoffs
• explaining why something exists

AI writes code. Developers decide what code should exist at all.

What I Actually Do Now

Most days, my job isn’t coding.

It’s:

• turning vague ideas into solvable problems
• translating between humans and machines
• stopping “small” decisions from becoming expensive mistakes

When I do write code, it’s usually boring. That’s intentional. Boring code survives.

If You’re Earlier in Your Career

A few things I wish someone told me:

• Seniority is not speed. It’s restraint.
• Complexity is a liability, not a flex.
• You’ll learn more from broken systems than successful demos.
• Your future self is your most important user.

And most importantly:

Feeling confused doesn’t mean you’re bad at this.
It means you’re actually learning.

Final Thought

I didn’t become a senior developer by mastering everything.

I became one by:

• being wrong
• fixing it
• remembering the cost
• and not repeating the same mistake twice

That’s it. That’s the secret.