Imposter Syndrome Didn't Go Away. It Got Quieter.

I noticed something last year. The imposter syndrome posts disappeared. Not gradually. They were everywhere — "I've been coding for three years and I still Google how to center a div," "just got promoted to senior and I have no idea what I'm doing," threads with thousands of likes, people in the replies saying me too, me too, me too . Then the LLMs arrived, and the posts stopped. I thought maybe the tools cured it. That we'd finally found the thing that made everyone feel competent. I was wrong. The feeling didn't go away. It just changed shape. The old imposter syndrome had a specific texture. You knew what you didn't know. You couldn't center a div, you'd never touched Kubernetes, you were faking it in standups about GraphQL. The gap was legible. You could name it, study it, fill it. That legibility is what made the posts shareable. "I don't know X" is a sentence you can say out loud. The new version is harder to name. You shipped the feature. The tests pass. Your manager is happy. B