I’ve been living in Santiago, the capital, for several weeks now, and it’s incredible how this whole country is concentrated in a single place. These days have been hectic: I found a job here doing what I was looking for, Python, AWS and, of course, data flying left and right. But a good part of the change has had nothing to do with work. I had to find a rental (arriendo), going from a cozy cabin with its pellet stove to an apartment with air conditioning. I’m not complaining, but it’s not the same. It’s not for me, and it’s not for my cat either. We both look outside through the screen so we don’t fall.

So, here, with a fridge, a couple of pieces of furniture and some kitchen stuff, this adventure begins.

I have to take the metro every day. The number of people is incredible. Rush hour gets packed with long faces, shoving and bad moods. But I get it, distances are much greater, and so are prices. Centralization. At least I have everything next door. If I want to shop, I have two Lider supermarkets a couple of minutes away. Are two Lider necessary? The truth is both are packed after 6 in the evening. There are also several pharmacies, bookstores, cafés, café chains, specialty coffee shops, small ones, big ones, themed ones, bad ones, good ones… The point is there are a lot of coffee shops. On top of that, there are restaurants and bars, a Domino’s that serves completos with the tomato on top, among many other stores of every kind with their own quirks, and there’s still a lot left to explore.

Job hunting in 2026

My job search was long. At one point I was torn between taking the full cloud path and going with AWS and its different specializations, since Python in the industry seemed like something forgotten or left to certain creatures hundreds of years old. But a hybrid worked: at its core it’s the ability to work with constant streams of data. Ensuring systems stay up and having the speech ready when it comes to interviews. Another decision was between on-site and remote. There, reality showed me how remote jobs have been disappearing. That pandemic-era industry no longer exists, it has been slowly dying out.

Worse still, a lot of the people who built their lives around remote work have had to go back to the offices. Imagine: a life built around that, the house, the kids’ school, transportation. Your whole spending flow changes completely between one way of working and the other. Because it’s obvious, a 20-minute trip is not the same as a 2-hour one. Having to take the metro or not. Having to share spaces or not. I think working on-site has its advantages, but I think a company that works remotely should keep betting on it.

Developing as I go

This post has been more on the reflective side. I hope to give my more technical opinion on things soon. I’d like to wrap up with an idea of what I think being a developer in 2026 is like. A lot to say, little to code. I think I spend more time talking to an agent and refining my instructions than defining patterns, classes or functions. More time paying down technical debt than leaving it behind. Understanding the domain and the business rules. Deciphering the intentions of other developers or PMs.

An industry that seems made for generalists, where anyone can program (wink, wink).

I spend most of my time translating logic between frontend, backend and infrastructure languages, and not deciding whether to use a frozenset or a tuple as a dictionary key. Specialized jobs probably still exist, I don’t know about in Chile. Even less so with the arrival of AI agents, something I plan to write about in another post, since this mess is already starting to look like Frankenstein.