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I appreciate what you're trying to do, but for myself, I'm not depressed because my skills are less valuable. I enjoyed the money but it was never about that f
by saulpw 1y ago
I appreciate what you're trying to do, but for myself, I'm not depressed because my skills are less valuable. I enjoyed the money but it was never about that for me. I'm depressed because I don't like the way this new coding feels in my brain. My focus and attention are my most precious resources and vibe coding just shatters them. I want to be absorbed in a coding flow where I see all the levels of the system and can elegantly bend the system to my will. Instead I'm stuck reviewing someone/something else's code which is always a grind, never a flow. And I can feel something terrible happening in my brain, which at best can be described as demotivation, and at worst just utter disinterest.
It's like if I were a gardener and I enjoyed touching dirt and singing to plants, and you're here on Gardener News extolling the virtues of these newfangled tractors and saying they'll accelerate my impact as a gardener. But they're so loud and unpleasant and frankly grotesque and even if I refrain from using one myself, all my neighbors are using them and are producing all their own vegetables, so they don't even care to trade produce anymore--with me or anyone else. So I look out at my garden with sadness, when it gave me such joy for so many decades, and try to figure out where I should move so I can at least avoid the fumes from all the tractors.
- shafyy 1y agoHow beautifully put, and I couldn't agree more. I feel exactly the same way. However, I am still unconvinced that software development will go down this way. But if woking as a software developer will require managing multiple agents at the same time instead of crafting your own code — you can count me out, too.
- sally_glance 1y agoWell said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ... Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.
- bonoboTP 1y agoThe OG alienator was the Agricultural Revolution, settling and toiling repetitively in predetermined ways, unlike the more adventurous lifestyle from before with all the camping, hunting, gathering, where circumstances brought always novel challenges, you could be a man spearing a deer, instead of just killing some docile domesticated cow. Searching for pheasant eggs and being happy if you found some, instead of going out every morning to the predictable presence of eggs in the chicken coop.
- sgt101 1y agoAlthough, gradually, all over the world people chose that lifestyle rather than take their chances with the seasons and the hunt.
- bonoboTP 1y agoExactly, and similarly people may adopt AI too, whether they like the aesthetics or not.
- bregma 1y agoMostly because if you settled down a tilled a field of barley you had a reliable source of beer. Finding beer in the wild was and still is an almost certain failure. The roots of global civilization are brown and frothy.
- sgt101 1y agoSo what you're telling me is that I am genetically predisposed to brew and drink beer? Explains a lot. Explains it to my satisfaction!
- bryanlarsen 1y agoChose is a little strong. They were forced into it because agricultural societies could field armies orders of magnitude larger than hunter/gatherers. It's telling that the nobles of agricultural societies generally still hunted, and often reserved that privilege.
- oaxacaoaxaca 1y agoVery well said. I feel the exact same. :(
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- geeunits 1y agoIf it is not about the money, why do you have to use these tools? If you enjoy small farming why concern yourself with mass production, or expensive equipment? Remain in the lane you enjoy?
- vbezhenar 1y agoI enjoy programming and I enjoy being paid for programming. I'm being pressed to use AI for my paid work. And I don't enjoy AI-powered programming. As of today, I've disabled Copilot. The only autocomplete that I can accept is absolutely mechanical one, not any kind of smart. I want to write the rest of the code myself. I like it. I was weird in StackOverflow era, because I never blindly applied snippets, like other programmers do. I went over them token by token, reading underlying library sources and docs, always creating my own solution. It made me less productive, but I feel that my code was more robust and maintainable, so it was a good trade-off for me. May be it'll work out the same way with AI, time will tell.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI think it will; AI is not going away, but once the hype has settled, the first companies have gone bankrupt or acquired, and employers are paying for them, they will become part of someone's daily tools not unlike the existing autocomplete tools.
- igleria 1y agoAs time goes by I tend to agree more and more with your POV.
- kasey_junk 1y agoFwiw I’m an ai proponent who loves that flow state you are describing. Programming literally was the first time I found it as a youth and I’ve been addicted to it since then. But it’s such a small part of my professional life. Most of what I do is chores and answering simple questions and planning for small iterations on the original thing or setting up a slightly different variant. Llm’s have freed me of so much of that! Now I outsource most of that work to the llms and greedily keep the deep flow inducing work for myself. And I have a new tool to explain to management why we are investing in all the tooling and processes that we know lead to quality, because the llms are catnip for the managerial mind.
- reginamary32 1y ago[dead]