This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
I get asked if I work here. A lot.
Target. Hallmark. Grocery stores. I'll be in jeans and a t-shirt, baseball cap on, holding my own cart, my own bags, clearly in the middle of my own shopping, and someone will walk up and ask where something is. Or skip the question entirely:
"Do you work here?"
I never do.
After a while, you stop being surprised. You start keeping track without trying. What you were wearing. How you were standing. Who asked. What they saw when they looked at you, and what they decided it meant. The catalog builds on its own.
It gets heavy.
In March 2026, I flew to Albuquerque for the NACM Midyear Conference, the National Association for Court Management.
I was there to present. My session was about whether courts should invest in building internal AI capacity through their frontline staff, and I used my own work as the case study. Jury eligibility chatbots. Document processing with AWS Textract. A data pipeline for eleven years of jury utilization records. An automation attempt that dead-ended when I found out vendor data quality was the real problem, not the AI.
Civic tech, built from the operations side, for people trying to figure out what AI actually means in their courts. I'd been writing about it and building for months. But this was the first time I was standing in front of court administrators at a national conference, in person, walking them through what I built and what it taught us.
I got to the hotel early, before registration opened. A woman walked up to the entrance at the same time I did, her hands full. I reached for the door.
"Would you like me to open it?"
She looked at me.
"Do you work here?"
I had on a baseball cap. Sunglasses. A Mexican woven shirt. I was just a person holding a door.
"No. Your hands are full."
She said she appreciated it.
I walked in ahead of her, stood in line ahead of her, and checked in.
Another entry.
Here's what I keep coming back to.
The places where people mistake me for staff are places where I've never once felt out of place. I think about the grocery store near my house where one of the women who works there calls me mija every time I come in. She doesn't know what I do. She doesn't care. She just sees me, and that's the whole interaction. No performance required. I think about the aisles where someone won't just point you toward what you're looking for but will walk you there. Those places take care of people.
No one asks you to earn it first.
The rooms I've actually earned my way into are different.
Not because anyone inside is doing something wrong. But because by the time I reach the door, someone has usually already told me what they think I am. So I walk in carrying it. Adjusting anyway. Even when I shouldn't have to.
That's what I carried into the conference room when I set up my slides and tested my mic in Albuquerque.
I gave the talk. It went well. People stayed for questions. Courts have followed up since, asking how to start their own AI work, how to think about risk, how to structure bounded experiments in an environment where you can't afford to get it wrong.
That was the whole point of being there.
That question doesn't stay at the door.
There's a conversation in AI/tech/dev communities right now about what counts as "real" building. If you learned with AI tools, if you came from outside the industry, if you figured it out as you went, there are people who will question whether it counts. Whether you understand what you shipped. Whether you earned it.
Sometimes it sounds like "Do you understand what you've built?"
Sometimes it sounds like "Do you work here?"
The mechanics are the same. Someone looks at you, decides what you are, and asks a question they already think they know the answer to.
I built things that work. I learned in the margins of a full-time job, using the tools available to get started and keep going. I also know what I don't know yet, and I'm working on closing those gaps.
Both of those are true at the same time.
I was careful about how I built for my work prototypes. Nothing went into production. That was by design. Every prototype existed to generate operational intelligence, to help court leadership understand what these tools could actually do before committing real resources. I documented everything. I set boundaries. I stopped when something wasn't mine to solve. I made it easier for my manager to say yes the next time.
The work did what it was supposed to do.
I don't have a clean ending for this.
The pattern started long before I learned to code, and it will keep going whether I build ten more prototypes or a hundred. I'm not interested in performing my way past it, and I don't think the answer is accumulating enough credentials that people stop asking the question. They won't.
I walked into that hotel. Then I walked into that conference room. I gave the talk I came to give.
If you're building from a path that doesn't look the way people expect, from a role without a clean title, from someone people size up before they listen to, you already know what the catalog feels like. It's not any single entry that weighs you down. It's that there's always a next one.
The catalog gets heavy.
The work is still yours.
AI assisted. Human approved. Powered by NLP.
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