Give a room of experienced professionals a real demo of what these tools can do now, and you can watch something move across their faces. It isn't excitement, and it isn't quite fear. It's grief. The same grief Elisabeth Kübler-Ross mapped for people facing a loss. Because that's what this is. Something they spent years building is being quietly repriced, and nobody asked them first.
Everybody grieves differently. But most people move through the same stages, roughly in order, whether they notice it or not.
Stage 1 — Denial
First it's denial. It's just hype. A party trick. It can't do what I do, it doesn't understand the context, it makes things up, it has no taste. All of which is true, right up until it isn't. Denial is comfortable because it asks nothing of you. You get to keep working exactly as you did yesterday and call the people paying attention naive.
Stage 2 — Anger
Then anger. Once you can't unsee it, the next feeling is that this thing is coming for your job and nobody asked you. You didn't sign up for this. You did everything right: got the degree, put in the years, earned the seniority, and now the rules are changing under your feet. The anger is fair. It's also not very useful, which is the hard part. Being right that it's unfair doesn't slow it down at all.
Stage 3 — Bargaining
Then bargaining. Maybe if I master the right prompts I can stay ahead of it. Maybe there's a certification, a niche, a workflow that keeps me one step in front. This stage actually produces useful work, so it's easy to mistake for acceptance. But underneath it's still a deal you're trying to strike with something that doesn't negotiate. You're hunting for the one move that lets you keep everything the way it was.
Stage 4 — Depression
Then depression. This is the quiet one, the one nobody posts about. What was the point of all those years? The late nights learning the thing, the slow accumulation of judgment, the pride in being the person who could do what most people couldn't. If a machine can approximate it, what was it all for. This stage is heavy because it isn't really about the tool. It's about meaning, and whether yours just evaporated.
Stage 5 — Acceptance
Then, if you keep showing up, acceptance. Not defeat. Clarity. You finally see what actually changed and what didn't. The rote parts of your craft, the parts you were secretly a little bored by anyway, those are leaving. The hard parts are mostly still here. You stop arguing with the weather and start dressing for it.
Stage 6 — Meaning
There's a sixth stage. David Kessler, who worked alongside Kübler-Ross, added it years after the original five: meaning. The part of grief where you build something out of the loss instead of just surviving it.
This is the part worth sitting with. When the rote work falls away, what's left is usually the work that mattered most in the first place. The judgment. What people now call taste. The human reasons behind the task: why this, why now, who it's for. Nobody got into their craft for the rote work. They tolerated it to get to the part that meant something.
So people don't just accept the new landscape and go quiet. The ones who come out the other side find a reason to keep working in it. That's the whole move. Not mastering the tool, not out-prompting it. Deciding what the work is for now that the busy parts are handled, and then going and doing that.
You'll grieve this in your own order, on your own schedule. Some people are still in denial. Some skipped straight to building. There's no prize for getting through it fast. But meaning is the stage worth aiming at, and it's the only one the tools can't reach on your behalf.
That part is still yours.