Looking at my recent posts on LinkedIn, my friends asked me, “Am I pivoting to AI?”. Got me thinking, and when I think of something, I sometimes like to write about it as well, so here we are.
Let’s start from the beginning. I’ve been working in the tech industry for more than a decade. I started as a Windows desktop application developer, moved into mobile applications, and then cloud and IoT. After working for a few years on Internet of Things, I moved into crypto in 2017. Since then, in the last eight years, I’ve been mostly working on the tech side of crypto, the part that focuses on blockchain technology and its use cases.
My primary goal with blockchain was to understand the technology in all of its dimensions. It is the only field that has some aspects of socio-economic thinking, some aspects of cryptography and privacy, transparency, and then there is governance and political stuff. Finally comes the technology, the distributed systems and consensus part of it. There is a lot to learn, and I was lucky that I got to do all that.
More recently, it has become clear that the blockchain has primarily financial use cases. It has become mostly about moving money and getting consensus on accounts and balances. All other use cases, like gaming, supply chain, enterprise audit trails, Web3 social, and Web3 applications in general, have not worked that well. Now, I could be completely wrong. There could be better blockchains in the future that make these things work. Right now, at least in 2026, we are at this point: non-financial use cases of blockchains are not successful.
So, I have to make a choice: whether I should go deep into the finance side of things and understand that field and continue to work on crypto/DeFi, or should I learn something new, something different? After doing eight years of blockchain stuff, I’m inclined towards doing something new for now.
The other part of the story is that I have been doing engineering management for most of my career: team lead, engineering manager, program manager, architect, director, and now founder. It’s been a thread running alongside whatever technology I was working on.
One thing that makes me a lot curious is: how could AI impact the rest of the software development lifecycle. The code writing part of AI, is well understood and used these days. Claude Code can one-shot an entire app. We have seen all of those crazy stories on the internet. But what about other parts of software development? What about estimation, capacity planning, spec writing, and requirements gathering?
I am still very much interested in building something, be it a traditional distributed system, or a crypto platform, or something in between. As long as it solves a real-world problem and it makes things easier for users. In the meantime, what I want to explore is: how is AI impacting the rest software development industry? How is it impacting organizations? How is it impacting leadership?
I’ll probably share my learnings here. I have been a software person, an engineering leader, for a long time. That’s not changing. What is changing is the tool I am examining: how it affects me, my peers, and people I work with. This is not a pivot; it’s a continuation, but with new tools and new thinking.