I got exactly what I wanted, a team that didn't need me for everything. I just wasn't ready for how that would feel.

Before AI changed the way I do my job, there was something else I hadn't realized about myself.

I liked feeling needed.

Because for a long time, being the person everyone relied on was how I measured my value. I don't think I understood that until it started to disappear.

Everything Came Through Me, and I Never Questioned It

One of the first things Pat, our CEO, ever broke at Gambit was a file he probably shouldn't have been editing.

At the time, we were still a team of three. If something technical needed to happen, it came through me. I wanted Pat to be able to make small changes himself without waiting on me, so I showed him how to edit a configuration file we kept on GitHub, an online filing system for code. It wasn't really meant for non-developers. It was written in JSON, a text-based format developers use to configure software, and editing it by hand was never particularly forgiving.

Sometimes the changes worked. Sometimes they didn't. And when they didn't, I'd jump in, figure out what had gone wrong, fix it, and we'd move on.

That wasn't unusual. It was just how our team at Gambit worked. There wasn't another engineering team, and no other developer to ask. If we couldn't build something, there was nothing to sell.

I never really questioned it because it made sense. We'd started the company together, I'd always been the technical one, and everyone naturally settled into their roles.

Looking back, though, I think something else was happening. Without realizing it, I'd started confusing being needed with being valuable.

I Built the Thing That Was Supposed to Need Me Less

As much as I liked feeling needed, I didn't want to be the bottleneck forever. The funny thing is, trying to fix that is what got me here.

Some of the work was repetitive, and I hated that. Every new product we agreed to build meant copying code, making the same changes, and solving problems I'd already solved before. It wasn't a good way to build a company.

I wanted my colleagues to be able to launch new AI products without waiting on me every time, so I built Gambit Cloud. Instead of rebuilding the same things over and over, we'd have a platform that handled the heavy lifting so we could focus on solving new problems.

Gambit Cloud is still the piece of software I'm proudest of. It made us faster and more consistent, and it gave the rest of the team the freedom to build without me in the room. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.

But there's something I've only realized recently.

I wanted everyone else to become more independent. At the same time, I enjoyed the moments when they still needed me. And I don't think I ever admitted that to myself.

The Thing I Was Chasing Wasn't the Code

I think that's part of why I always gave the same tidy answer whenever people asked what I did at Gambit. Pat and Ryan built the car. I built the engine.

Nobody buys a car because of the engine. Most people never even look at it. But without it, nothing moves.

I've always liked that analogy because it describes the kind of engineering work I enjoy. The best systems disappear into the background. If you've done your job well, people don't think about the complexity underneath. They just use the product.

But that's not the whole story.

The part I loved most had less to do with the code and everything to do with what happened right after.

You'd spend days building something. Then you'd demo it. Someone would stop for a second. Maybe they'd smile, laugh, or just look at you like you'd done something impossible.

Those moments felt incredible. For a long time, I thought I was chasing difficult engineering problems. But really I was chasing the surprise, the appreciation, and the moment someone looked at me and thought, I'm really glad you're here. I was addicted.

Confusing Being Needed With Being Valuable

A few weeks ago, I wrote about coming back from two weeks away to find that my role at the company had quietly changed while I was gone. This is the part of that story I didn't get into: what I was really grieving.

AI could suddenly build things that used to require an engineer, and underneath that, I'd built part of my identity around being the person everyone depended on.

The irony is that I spent years trying to build systems that made people need me less. That's what good engineering is supposed to do. You remove bottlenecks, create leverage, and build things that scale beyond yourself.

I believed all of that, and I still do. But every time someone came to me with a problem only I could solve, it gave me something I didn't realize I was looking for.

It reminded me why I mattered.

Looking back, I don't think I loved being the bottleneck because I enjoyed having more work. I loved it because it gave me certainty. As long as people needed me, I never had to ask myself where my value came from. I just never imagined I'd have to answer that question another way.