It’s not every day a random show makes you feel personally called out by a tree.

I was half-watching a reality travel show where one stop was Madagascar. I remember staring with wide (somewhat misty) eyes at a shot of the golden hour, sweeping savanna, baobab trees lined up against the sky like something out of another planet.

A voiceover briefly mentioned, over a wistful tune, that the trees come with a legend. Something about the gods, a punishment, and being planted upside down.

Once you hear that, you can’t look at the tree the same way 🥲

What had looked like an almost alien silhouette, beautiful and surreal against that golden-hour sky, suddenly rearranged itself. Those things at the top weren’t branches. They were roots.

Roots that were reaching up instead of down. That, once you saw, could never unsee again. That made what was a majestic, out-of-this-world tree really just an upside-down tree.

While the episode moved on, I spent the next hour reading everything I could find on baobab folklore, and somewhere in all of it I couldn’t shake the feeling that it all sounded oddly familiar.

And it should, because developers in 2026 kind of look like the (alleged) upside-down baobab tree.

Hey! Okay so this is going to be a little bit of a stranger than usual post. But I’ve been swamped with work and got myself tangled in a hackathon recently, so here’s a piece of my mental tangle. I promise it’s actually interesting.

The Malagasy Legend Behind the Upside-Down Tree

According to Malagasy legend, the baobab wasn’t always this shape. It started proud of its size.

Then it saw the palm tree and wanted to be taller.

It saw the flame tree’s red blossoms and wanted flowers of its own.

It saw the fig tree’s fruit and wanted that too.

The gods got tired of the tree’s constant wanting and pulled it out of the ground, then replanted it upside down to put a stop to the vanity.

That’s one version. Travel through different regions, and you’ll hear different tellings.

Along the Zambezi, some tribes say angry gods yanked the tree out and tossed it back down at random. Another version has a hyena so repelled by the tree’s strange shape that it shoved the whole thing over to be rid of it.

Even in Madagascar, the story shifts from village to village since nobody’s fully agreed on the details.

What everyone agrees on is the shape: a trunk with branches that look exactly like roots, bare for most of the year, reaching up instead of down.

Tip 🤓
The science on this took a while to catch up to the folklore. Botanists mostly assumed baobabs originated on mainland Africa until a 2024 genome study confirmed they actually started in Madagascar around 21 million years ago, then spread to Africa and Australia by way of ocean currents. The legend had Madagascar right long before the DNA did.

How AI Exposed the Developer Skill Hierarchy

For most of my career, the skill ladder in software had a pretty clear shape. The deeper your technical knowledge went, the more respect it earned you.

Knowing your frameworks cold, writing clean algorithms, and tracking down a nasty bug at any ungodly time. That was the root system.

It was buried, unglamorous, and doing the work that held everything else up. Nobody outside the field saw it, but everyone inside the field knew exactly how much it counted for.

Now flip it.

The part of the job that used to be the deepest, most specialized root—project scaffolding—is the part sitting fully exposed in the open air.

I mean this literally.

Setting up a new project used to be one of the most daunting parts of starting anything. You had to figure out:

• What the directory structure looked like.
• Which packages to install.
• Formatting configs, linting configs, deciding whether this was going to be the project where you finally set up path aliases correctly.

If you were on TypeScript, there was your tsconfig, the file that tells the compiler what to enforce, with options you either understood or copied from a boilerplate and hoped for the best.

Also, don’t you dare forget which @types packages you should install, because half the ecosystem still ships without its own types.

It was enough of an ordeal that it stopped people from starting projects, not because the idea was hard but because the setup was.

I remember treating that setup phase almost like a separate skill from the rest of the job.

You could know exactly what you wanted to build and still lose a whole evening to tsconfig.json arguing with your import paths, or realizing three files in that you picked the wrong module resolution strategy for the bundler you’re using.

None of that taught you anything about the product you were trying to make. It was simply the toll you had to pay to start.

I open Cursor now and describe the project I want, and the scaffolding is there in the time it takes me to read what was generated.

Tip 🔥
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t, in fact, throw a generic prompt or request to my agent, even when it comes down to scaffolding. I will always have a structured prompt that specifies the packages, the technology we’re working on, the desired framework, and all of this comes out of the initial phase of research, project architecture and planning. Then I outline everything in workflow files for consistency and reference.

The root system that used to be buried, specialized, and slow to build by hand is now sitting in the open air, done in seconds by something that isn’t me.

Though by no means am I complaining, it’s still disorienting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t spend years building that particular muscle.

Explore: How AI Makes It Really Easy To Stop Thinking

Vibe Coding Changed Who Gets to Build Software

Scroll YouTube long enough, and you’ll find channels run by people who open with “I’m not a coder,” then show off a game, full app, or dashboard they built and are now selling.

Not a demo. Something with users paying for it 👀

On the hiring and career side, the same thing shows up from a different angle.

You have CEOs and experts talking about a product manager who vibe-coded an entire internal tool, or a designer who went from a Figma file straight to a working prototype with no engineer in sight.

These are people who, in many cases, couldn’t tell you what half the code they generated is actually doing.

The code itself might not be clean. It might not be syntactically correct, or scale past the first hundred users, or hold up under a security review.

But it’s also something built and shipped by someone with none of the traditional path behind them.

Watching that happen while you’re the one who spent years earning the traditional path is a specific kind of vertigo. Not because the work is worthless now, but because what used to be the entire barrier to entry isn’t a barrier anymore for many people.

The part that used to require years to earn is something anyone can pick up in a weekend and start shipping immediately, regardless if done badly or not.

Related: This Is The Simple Reason I Choose To Co-Code Instead Of Vibe Code

What Actually Keeps Developers Valuable in the AI Era

A mature baobab can store thousands of gallons of water in its trunk, which is exactly what lets it survive months of drought that would kill most other trees in the same stretch of dry ground.

Its bark is thick enough to survive wildfires that would take down anything around it, and if the bark gets damaged, the tree can regrow it, a kind of repair most trees can’t manage 💪

Water storage or fire resistance didn’t happen at the roots, but in the trunk. That’s the part of the tree still doing the deep, structural work, not the part anyone associates with “real” tree behavior.

Nobody stops to admire a trunk. They stop for the shape at the top, the part that looks strange from a distance.

But the trunk is what’s keeping the tree alive through the part of the year when nothing else survives.

That’s close to the actual shift happening in this job. The value isn’t gone—it moved 💁‍♀️

It’s not “can I write this function” anymore. Most of the time, I can’t write it faster than the tool sitting next to me can generate it.

What hasn’t moved is whether I can look at what was generated and know it’s the right function that will hold up once users hit it, and not only “work” in the happy path.

I can determine whether the architecture underneath it is something I’ll regret in six months. And whether the AI’s confident-sounding answer is actually correct, or simply confident.

Note: Lack of understanding is actually where most AI-generated code gets people in trouble. The AI’s response can look airtight and still fail the moment it hits an edge case nobody described in the prompt.

Understanding and comprehension are a dev’s water storage. It’s the aspect of the job that’s not visible from the outside the way “I wrote 500 lines of code today” used to be visible.

Nobody screenshots a good architecture decision. Yet it’s the thing that survives the drought, and it’s also the thing a vibe-coded prototype usually doesn’t have, which is probably why so many of them crumble the moment real users start doing things the builder never imagined.

It’s a Wrap

Being upside down doesn’t mean you have to be invisible. The one detail about the baobab that has nothing to do with survival mechanics is that it’s recognizable.

From an entire savanna full of ordinary trees, you can confidently point at a baobab, specifically because of the thing that was supposed to be its punishment.

The roots-in-the-sky shape is the whole reason anyone stops to look; it’s not hidden.

Nobody drives past one and mistakes it for something ordinary that happened to grow strangely.

Which is why it’s so ideal to describe our present. This is, indeed, a strange, uprooted time to be doing this work.

Watching someone with zero background ship something real is frustrating. Watching a tool do in ten seconds what used to gatekeep an entire career path can be maddening.

The reality is that the shape of the work changed. Not whether the work still matters, but its shape.

If a tree can spend 21 million years learning how to turn “upside down” into “built for the drought,” I’m willing to bet developers can work out our version of the same thing.

Probably faster, since we at least have the advantage of knowing it’s happening while it’s happening.

I hope you see the baobab (and yourself) not as failure but as resilience.

Cheers! 🪾