35 ms·

The happiest I've ever been

662 points by bewal416 7mo ago

hyperhello 7mo ago
> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  > only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
reconnecting 7mo ago
The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults. I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline. Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.
- jnovek 7mo ago
  I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.
    - reconnecting 7mo ago
      jnovek, don't listen to him! Piracy is never the way. https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 (The Offspring - Have You Ever)
      - mvanbaak 7mo ago
        What if the the alternatives are worse?
    - DougN7 7mo ago
      There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was worth). I _hope_ AI will do similarly, but I have my doubts on that one.
      - reconnecting 7mo ago
        The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.
      - samiv 7mo ago
        Technology doesn't do anything by itself. The result of it on the fabric of the society depends on how it is applied, whether the benefits are distributed to everyone (to some extent) or not. It's possible that taby technology is just used to displace people who lose their livelihoods and income while the benefits flow the capital owning class. In fact all the great productivity boosts that have taken place over the last decades since WW2 have mostly befitted the capital class. That's why a worker still grinds away 8h a week and barely scares by while the "elites" splurge on yacths, mansions and space travel for leisure.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    A decade ago, you needed to think and choose from a dozen solutions, now AI provides you with two options to execute. A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.
dgritsko 7mo ago
These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.
- DonThomasitos 7mo ago
  One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
  - bityard 7mo ago
    I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can. But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.
    - mjdiloreto 7mo ago
      I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis. Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment). On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job. And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it! We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.
internet2000 7mo ago
The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
- voxl 7mo ago
  If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.
  - logicprog 7mo ago
    What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible? Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added." AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
  - cataphract 7mo ago
    I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me. AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
  - signatoremo 7mo ago
tayo42 7mo ago
I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.
- mmmm2 7mo ago
  Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc. It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
  - tayo42 7mo ago
    If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!
- sntran 7mo ago
  I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.
  - tryauuum 7mo ago
    any electricians here who want to give a piece of advice?
  - EddieB 7mo ago
    Had this thought multiple times over the years. However, reality in the UK is training cost and time (~2 years with 2 days a week college + at least ~£5k cost and further 2 years gaining experience) can be quite a blocker- difficult to achieve with dependents for most. Then throw in the reality of domestic work and building up experience. Greener grass and all that
    - sntran 7mo ago
fortzi 7mo ago
OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft. Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.
- gombosg 7mo ago
  Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- antonvs 7mo ago
  I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example? The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
  - Flere-Imsaho 7mo ago
    CSS boxes! Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.
    - antonvs 7mo ago
      Oh that makes sense, thanks. I don’t deal with CSS in my work. It seems like an oddly specific thing to reduce “tech” in general to.
- jhatemyjob 7mo ago
  When I hit that part I was like.... you don't enjoy the work. It has nothing to do with AI. One way or another you're gonna get smoked by the ones who actually like doing this stuff. There's good money in the fitness industry.
RickJWagner 7mo ago
I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times. One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids. I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural. Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster! Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go. I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
arjie 7mo ago
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year. Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C. Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today. Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper. Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
- pelma 7mo ago
  I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
- RGamma 7mo ago
  And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
DonThomasitos 7mo ago
Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.
- kakacik 7mo ago
  I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.
NickNaraghi 7mo ago
Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list. Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite. [0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
- TobinCavanaugh 7mo ago
  Very interesting, explains why video games CAN be so much fun.
- deaux 7mo ago
  > Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite. Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.
- StrangeSound 7mo ago
  Thanks for this, I've ordered it and look forward to reading it!
bloomingeek 7mo ago
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad. With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  That’s some powerful self insight you achieved.
- electrosphere 7mo ago
  As I get older I've realized that speaking less and just listening more has a LOT of value
- steezeburger 7mo ago
  I love this! Stealing it! :) It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak. Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!
- bmikaili 7mo ago
  https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech It's hard.
bengale 7mo ago
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
- nvarsj 7mo ago
  There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
  - bengale 7mo ago
    Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.
    - nlavezzo 7mo ago
      100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person. People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.
      - 7mo ago
gedy 7mo ago
I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.
freetime2 7mo ago
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time. Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  Pretty certain the coaching is their job for the soccer coaches at our elementary school. 6 years of kids each with 3 practices a week + matches.
  - bdangubic 7mo ago
    except it is not, no one’s actual profession (and only job) is youth soccer coach (few exception are retired people etc). it would be impossible to make a living if this was your only job
- watermelon59 7mo ago
  As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot. Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played. Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
  - freetime2 7mo ago
    I live in Japan, so it's not just an American phenomenon. I think most schools provide transportation to away games. But in my city official school sports clubs don't start until high school - before that it's all private club teams. In my kids' club, the team will provide transportation to far away games in other prefectures, or sometimes for games on school holidays when parents may be working. But it's very common for parents to have to drive their kids an hour or more to other cities within our prefecture. Carpooling is very common. But most parents want to watch their kids' games as much as possible. Even when the team provides transportation to a game, there are a handful of parents who will make the drive separately to support the team. My son asked me to drive 3 hours to watch an upcoming big game and support the team, and of course I'm not going to say no. To be able to see how far he has progressed, and to know that he wants me there to support him, is special. But also still exhausting at times.
jebarker 7mo ago
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
- daxfohl 7mo ago
  Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good. But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else. So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
RataNova 7mo ago
A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability
colinnordin 7mo ago
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader. I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
- matthewpick 7mo ago
  I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person
- RataNova 7mo ago
  I suspect a lot of people don't actually dislike software development, they dislike developing without anyone invested in their development
- data-ottawa 7mo ago
  I have had managers like this and it was fantastic. I’ve tried to be a mentor like this and enjoyed it too. It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.
shermantanktop 7mo ago
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy. I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play. On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
pppoiuy 7mo ago
gggoip
- santram 7mo ago
  gggoip
billylo 7mo ago
I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.
carabiner 7mo ago
Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.
- ryan_n 7mo ago
  It is kind of funny that people here tend to dump on Reddit a lot (often times warranted, don’t get me wrong), when this place is an echo chamber in a similar way.
0898 7mo ago
Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.
hinkley 7mo ago
To ask the question Ted Lasso never answers: What is a Hoosier?
light_triad 7mo ago
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change. But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear. AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  What does this word salad mean?
  - ioudep 7mo ago
    “Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value.” People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.” So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself. ⸻ “Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.” Historically, this always happens. Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort. Each time, people initially interpret it as: the skill is dying But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance. Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility ⸻ “But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.” This rejects the common fear narrative. The activities persist, what changes is why they matter. You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement. The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist. ⸻ “AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.” This is the core claim. Old model: effort → output → value New model: judgment → outcome → value Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity. Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact Not: Did you make something? But: Did reality change because you were involved? You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention. ⸻ “The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.” So the post ends optimistic. AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting. Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world. Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly. Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect). ⸻ In one sentence The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.
engineer_22 7mo ago
I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.
tap-snap-or-nap 7mo ago
We are just priced out of having this type of happiness due to high cost of living in a first world urban environment.
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  Every single environment that has a critical mass of people will have an elementary and middle school. How could you possibly be priced out of this?
  - deaux 7mo ago
    This entire concept doesn't exist in much of the world. The incredible prevalence of intramural sports, and the seriousness of it, at all kinds of age groups is a very US phenomenon. Let alone random neighborhood people coaching teams. In most of the world it's more club-based rather than school-based, and that's quite different.
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      But surely they still need youth coaches?
  - Markoff 7mo ago
    I assume he meant coaching full time would not pay the bills for living. My kids elementary school doesn't have their own teams/coeaches, everything is managed through different NGO/non-profit which has contracts to use gyms in various schools. The yearly fee for being member of a sport club varies between 100-250EUR which certainly is not enough to pay the coaches full time.
stopping 7mo ago
I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line. I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain. I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place. Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions. Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters. I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills. Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.
lr4444lr 7mo ago
As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
- grimgrin 7mo ago
  I'm sure we've all met an unhappy teacher. As well, ain't no way you're pulling me back into an office ;)
- daxfohl 7mo ago
  Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.
- electrosphere 7mo ago
  I work mostly remotely, recently our Fibre internet upgrade left us without internet for a week. It forced me to work from a nearby university library - which turned out to do wonders for my mental health. I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.
- gehsty 7mo ago
  Super interesting to hear your experience, I agree that it is very dystopian. I have put up with it (with effect on my performance and somewhat my mental health), to be around my family more. Things like doing pick up and drop offs at school consistently has been wonderful.
- kj4211cash 7mo ago
  So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.
dejawu 7mo ago
This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.
- watermelon59 7mo ago
  Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time? I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.
saltcod 7mo ago
Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!
DGAP 7mo ago
This is a nice sentiment and all but the issue is that I need to make money to pay for goods and services.
_9hey 7mo ago
> I accepted the propaganda that my value to this world only went as far as my product could scale. At 28, I’m finally beginning to challenge that. this struck me
deaux 7mo ago
> You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza? This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.
sardukardboard 7mo ago
It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)
jasleenchhabra 7mo ago
really good
kurttheviking 7mo ago
I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.
abhitriloki 7mo ago
[flagged]
Kiro 7mo ago
> If I could give any advice to someone who needs it, I’d tell them to write down the things that have made them happy, and then explore why. > But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe. What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?
gehsty 7mo ago
Amazing story congrats on being a great coach - this kids will remember you and that experience. My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon. We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure… Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!
martopix 7mo ago
I've quit my career in academia three years ago and teach high school kids instead. I can totally relate, I'm just so much happier: I love those four things he listed, except the fourth for me is physics instead of basketball.
gorgoiler 7mo ago
If you love helping children and also love moving small rectangles around a larger rectangle then Code Club from The Raspberry Pi Foundation is crushing it, and needs volunteers: https://codeclub.org/ https://codeclub.org/
abhaynayar 7mo ago
It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though. Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.
Toorkit 7mo ago
My happiness peaked sometime around 10-11 years old, it's been downhill ever since
toddmorey 7mo ago
“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.” Best summation of my current feelings yet.
quirk 7mo ago
There is another, deeper level of happiness, not mentioned in any of these comments. Around 62% of the US population has found it. That number used to be higher. In the tech world it's much smaller percentage. The powerful love you feel as a father or mother can actually be compounded, even when didn't think that was possible. It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.
- srean 7mo ago
  > It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time. If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement. Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.
  - quirk 7mo ago
    I don't think that one's even on the list of top 1,000. It's incredible how hard we try to avoid hard things.
- jjbiotech 7mo ago
  And turns out the patterns and metaphor in this book can be co opted. Without belief in the supernatural, or submission to human authority structures. Though still receiving and giving the same benefits. Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.
  - quirk 7mo ago
    Who built it?
dismalaf 7mo ago
In a similar but slightly different vein, I found that doing things with my own child (now 3.5 years old) is far more rewarding than I ever imagined. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy in his eyes when he discovers something new, accomplishes something or even just gets excited when I come home from work. I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.
iguhhyfchh 7mo ago
[dead]
globular-toast 7mo ago
Odd. I never felt that moving rectangles around was my shot at happiness. My whole career I've spent doing things I genuinely believe are useful and help people. If moving rectangles is no longer useful then so be it, I'll do something else. I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example. What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs. It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.
whattheheckheck 7mo ago
Read some Denial of Death and pick an immortality project that won't cause undue suffering

662 points by bewal416 7mo ago

> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.

SoftTalker 7mo ago
> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

reconnecting 7mo ago

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults. I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline. Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

jnovek 7mo ago
I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    jnovek, don't listen to him! Piracy is never the way. https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 (The Offspring - Have You Ever)
    - mvanbaak 7mo ago
      What if the the alternatives are worse?
  - DougN7 7mo ago
    There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was worth). I _hope_ AI will do similarly, but I have my doubts on that one.
    - reconnecting 7mo ago
      The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.
    - samiv 7mo ago
      Technology doesn't do anything by itself. The result of it on the fabric of the society depends on how it is applied, whether the benefits are distributed to everyone (to some extent) or not. It's possible that taby technology is just used to displace people who lose their livelihoods and income while the benefits flow the capital owning class. In fact all the great productivity boosts that have taken place over the last decades since WW2 have mostly befitted the capital class. That's why a worker still grinds away 8h a week and barely scares by while the "elites" splurge on yacths, mansions and space travel for leisure.
pixl97 7mo ago
>I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  A decade ago, you needed to think and choose from a dozen solutions, now AI provides you with two options to execute. A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.

dgritsko 7mo ago

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

DonThomasitos 7mo ago
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
- bityard 7mo ago
  I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can. But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.
  - mjdiloreto 7mo ago
    I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis. Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment). On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job. And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it! We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.

internet2000 7mo ago

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

voxl 7mo ago
If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.
- logicprog 7mo ago
  What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible? Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?
SoftTalker 7mo ago
The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added." AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
- cataphract 7mo ago
  I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me. AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
- signatoremo 7mo ago

tayo42 7mo ago

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.

mmmm2 7mo ago
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc. It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
- tayo42 7mo ago
  If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!
sntran 7mo ago
I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.
- tryauuum 7mo ago
  any electricians here who want to give a piece of advice?
- EddieB 7mo ago
  Had this thought multiple times over the years. However, reality in the UK is training cost and time (~2 years with 2 days a week college + at least ~£5k cost and further 2 years gaining experience) can be quite a blocker- difficult to achieve with dependents for most. Then throw in the reality of domestic work and building up experience. Greener grass and all that
  - sntran 7mo ago

fortzi 7mo ago

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft. Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

gombosg 7mo ago
Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
antonvs 7mo ago
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example? The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
- Flere-Imsaho 7mo ago
  CSS boxes! Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.
  - antonvs 7mo ago
    Oh that makes sense, thanks. I don’t deal with CSS in my work. It seems like an oddly specific thing to reduce “tech” in general to.
jhatemyjob 7mo ago
When I hit that part I was like.... you don't enjoy the work. It has nothing to do with AI. One way or another you're gonna get smoked by the ones who actually like doing this stuff. There's good money in the fitness industry.

RickJWagner 7mo ago

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times. One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids. I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural. Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster! Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go. I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

arjie 7mo ago

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year. Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C. Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today. Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper. Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

pelma 7mo ago
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
RGamma 7mo ago
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.

DonThomasitos 7mo ago

Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.

kakacik 7mo ago
I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
pixl97 7mo ago
Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.

NickNaraghi 7mo ago

Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list. Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite. [0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

TobinCavanaugh 7mo ago
Very interesting, explains why video games CAN be so much fun.
deaux 7mo ago
> Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite. Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
jimbokun 7mo ago
I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.
StrangeSound 7mo ago
Thanks for this, I've ordered it and look forward to reading it!

bloomingeek 7mo ago

My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad. With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.

jimbokun 7mo ago
That’s some powerful self insight you achieved.
electrosphere 7mo ago
As I get older I've realized that speaking less and just listening more has a LOT of value
steezeburger 7mo ago
I love this! Stealing it! :) It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak. Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!
bmikaili 7mo ago
https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech It's hard.

bengale 7mo ago

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

nvarsj 7mo ago
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
- bengale 7mo ago
  Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.
  - nlavezzo 7mo ago
    100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person. People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.
    - 7mo ago

gedy 7mo ago

I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.

freetime2 7mo ago

I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time. Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.

Aeolun 7mo ago
Pretty certain the coaching is their job for the soccer coaches at our elementary school. 6 years of kids each with 3 practices a week + matches.
- bdangubic 7mo ago
  except it is not, no one’s actual profession (and only job) is youth soccer coach (few exception are retired people etc). it would be impossible to make a living if this was your only job
watermelon59 7mo ago
As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot. Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played. Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
- freetime2 7mo ago
  I live in Japan, so it's not just an American phenomenon. I think most schools provide transportation to away games. But in my city official school sports clubs don't start until high school - before that it's all private club teams. In my kids' club, the team will provide transportation to far away games in other prefectures, or sometimes for games on school holidays when parents may be working. But it's very common for parents to have to drive their kids an hour or more to other cities within our prefecture. Carpooling is very common. But most parents want to watch their kids' games as much as possible. Even when the team provides transportation to a game, there are a handful of parents who will make the drive separately to support the team. My son asked me to drive 3 hours to watch an upcoming big game and support the team, and of course I'm not going to say no. To be able to see how far he has progressed, and to know that he wants me there to support him, is special. But also still exhausting at times.

jebarker 7mo ago

Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.

daxfohl 7mo ago
Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good. But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else. So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.

RataNova 7mo ago

A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability

colinnordin 7mo ago

> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader. I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.

matthewpick 7mo ago
I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person
RataNova 7mo ago
I suspect a lot of people don't actually dislike software development, they dislike developing without anyone invested in their development
data-ottawa 7mo ago
I have had managers like this and it was fantastic. I’ve tried to be a mentor like this and enjoyed it too. It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.

shermantanktop 7mo ago

My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy. I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play. On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.

pppoiuy 7mo ago

gggoip

santram 7mo ago
gggoip

billylo 7mo ago

I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.

carabiner 7mo ago

Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.

ryan_n 7mo ago
It is kind of funny that people here tend to dump on Reddit a lot (often times warranted, don’t get me wrong), when this place is an echo chamber in a similar way.

0898 7mo ago

Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.

hinkley 7mo ago

To ask the question Ted Lasso never answers: What is a Hoosier?

light_triad 7mo ago

Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change. But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear. AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.

Aeolun 7mo ago
I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.
jimbokun 7mo ago
What does this word salad mean?
- ioudep 7mo ago
  “Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value.” People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.” So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself. ⸻ “Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.” Historically, this always happens. Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort. Each time, people initially interpret it as: the skill is dying But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance. Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility ⸻ “But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.” This rejects the common fear narrative. The activities persist, what changes is why they matter. You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement. The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist. ⸻ “AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.” This is the core claim. Old model: effort → output → value New model: judgment → outcome → value Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity. Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact Not: Did you make something? But: Did reality change because you were involved? You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention. ⸻ “The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.” So the post ends optimistic. AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting. Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world. Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly. Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect). ⸻ In one sentence The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.

engineer_22 7mo ago

I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.

tap-snap-or-nap 7mo ago

We are just priced out of having this type of happiness due to high cost of living in a first world urban environment.

Aeolun 7mo ago
Every single environment that has a critical mass of people will have an elementary and middle school. How could you possibly be priced out of this?
- deaux 7mo ago
  This entire concept doesn't exist in much of the world. The incredible prevalence of intramural sports, and the seriousness of it, at all kinds of age groups is a very US phenomenon. Let alone random neighborhood people coaching teams. In most of the world it's more club-based rather than school-based, and that's quite different.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    But surely they still need youth coaches?
- Markoff 7mo ago
  I assume he meant coaching full time would not pay the bills for living. My kids elementary school doesn't have their own teams/coeaches, everything is managed through different NGO/non-profit which has contracts to use gyms in various schools. The yearly fee for being member of a sport club varies between 100-250EUR which certainly is not enough to pay the coaches full time.

stopping 7mo ago

I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line. I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain. I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place. Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions. Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters. I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills. Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.

lr4444lr 7mo ago

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

grimgrin 7mo ago
I'm sure we've all met an unhappy teacher. As well, ain't no way you're pulling me back into an office ;)
daxfohl 7mo ago
Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.
electrosphere 7mo ago
I work mostly remotely, recently our Fibre internet upgrade left us without internet for a week. It forced me to work from a nearby university library - which turned out to do wonders for my mental health. I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.
gehsty 7mo ago
Super interesting to hear your experience, I agree that it is very dystopian. I have put up with it (with effect on my performance and somewhat my mental health), to be around my family more. Things like doing pick up and drop offs at school consistently has been wonderful.
kj4211cash 7mo ago
So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.

dejawu 7mo ago

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

watermelon59 7mo ago
Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time? I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.

saltcod 7mo ago

Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!

DGAP 7mo ago

This is a nice sentiment and all but the issue is that I need to make money to pay for goods and services.

_9hey 7mo ago

> I accepted the propaganda that my value to this world only went as far as my product could scale. At 28, I’m finally beginning to challenge that. this struck me

deaux 7mo ago

> You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza? This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.

sardukardboard 7mo ago

It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)

jasleenchhabra 7mo ago

really good

kurttheviking 7mo ago

I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.

abhitriloki 7mo ago

[flagged]

Kiro 7mo ago

> If I could give any advice to someone who needs it, I’d tell them to write down the things that have made them happy, and then explore why. > But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe. What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?

gehsty 7mo ago

Amazing story congrats on being a great coach - this kids will remember you and that experience. My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon. We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure… Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!

martopix 7mo ago

I've quit my career in academia three years ago and teach high school kids instead. I can totally relate, I'm just so much happier: I love those four things he listed, except the fourth for me is physics instead of basketball.

gorgoiler 7mo ago

If you love helping children and also love moving small rectangles around a larger rectangle then Code Club from The Raspberry Pi Foundation is crushing it, and needs volunteers: https://codeclub.org/ https://codeclub.org/

abhaynayar 7mo ago

It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though. Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.

Toorkit 7mo ago

My happiness peaked sometime around 10-11 years old, it's been downhill ever since

toddmorey 7mo ago

“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.” Best summation of my current feelings yet.

quirk 7mo ago

There is another, deeper level of happiness, not mentioned in any of these comments. Around 62% of the US population has found it. That number used to be higher. In the tech world it's much smaller percentage. The powerful love you feel as a father or mother can actually be compounded, even when didn't think that was possible. It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.

srean 7mo ago
> It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time. If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement. Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.
- quirk 7mo ago
  I don't think that one's even on the list of top 1,000. It's incredible how hard we try to avoid hard things.
jjbiotech 7mo ago
And turns out the patterns and metaphor in this book can be co opted. Without belief in the supernatural, or submission to human authority structures. Though still receiving and giving the same benefits. Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.
- quirk 7mo ago
  Who built it?

dismalaf 7mo ago

In a similar but slightly different vein, I found that doing things with my own child (now 3.5 years old) is far more rewarding than I ever imagined. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy in his eyes when he discovers something new, accomplishes something or even just gets excited when I come home from work. I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.

iguhhyfchh 7mo ago

[dead]

globular-toast 7mo ago

Odd. I never felt that moving rectangles around was my shot at happiness. My whole career I've spent doing things I genuinely believe are useful and help people. If moving rectangles is no longer useful then so be it, I'll do something else. I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example. What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs. It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.

whattheheckheck 7mo ago

Read some Denial of Death and pick an immortality project that won't cause undue suffering