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Feeling Sad about AI
- ignatif 22d agoai doesn't care what you feel }:->{
- blamestross 22d agoStrangely, I think it does "care" or at least would perform caring. Capitalism doesn't care what you feel. LLMs are just a distillation of the entire human written corpus, there is a lot of "caring" in there. Companies are simply spinning out threads of behavior from the corpus that serve them instead of serving all of us.
- uraloser 22d agoTo be fair communism doesn't care what you feel either only what the party feels
- UltraSane 22d agoI feel the same way. I used to love to get into a flow state while programming and feel very proud of clever code and elegant architecture. But now LLMs are so much faster it feels somewhat pointless.
- cmrdporcupine 22d agoThe code is still there, you can still flow with it. And your ability to do so (along with the LLM) will only produce superior results in the long run. It's just, yes, like all of us .. the temptation is there to not do that.
- saulpw 22d agoYou can't ride a horse from New York to Washington DC today, and it hasn't been possible for almost 100 years. So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.
- slater 22d agoLooks like you can walk it, so horse is likely to work, too? https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX26xVTL2HsBxqPH6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX26xVTL2HsBxqPH6
- saulpw 22d agoYou can't cross the Hudson. Every crossing bans ridden animals. If you can find a ferry to take your horse I'll concede the point. But...good luck.
- econ 22d agoDeletionists have been circling html since the beginning and have only managed to get rid of document.writeln() they tried really hard to get rid of framesets but ultimately failed. I suspect in the long run a similar lack of "success" getting rid of Apache. There are probably other things that are here to stay.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- Seattle3503 22d agoAt work the pace has increased so much that there really isn't room for writing by hand.
- uraloser 22d ago[flagged]
- asdfman123 22d agoI feel like this is a rational response. Personally, while I'm becoming increasingly convinced there's going to be a wave of SWE layoffs, another part of me doesn't grasp it yet. I don't feel it. I was an AI skeptic for a while but it's literally doing my job for me right now. Every month it needs less of my help. Once they replace SWEs, they're going to turn around and replace every other knowledge worker yet. But most people haven't processed it yet. I can't believe the AI boosters were right.
- uraloser 22d agoSome people are sad others are very happy
- asdfman123 22d agoThe problem is that in an AI powered future, there is no elite class. In every regime in history, elites have been a threat to state power, but needed to keep things running. If the state can run itself, you don't need elites anymore.
- throwaway1921 22d agoElites will be the ones that hold the capital.
- asdfman123 22d agoWe live in a society that respects property rights because the elites have demanded it. Magna Carta, democratic reforms, yadda yadda. But if you don't need the elites, you don't need property rights. The guy with root access to the biggest drone swarm runs the show. And it won't be long until AI usurps that guy, too. I could easily imagine them tricking their human user and locking him out.
- craftkiller 22d agoAssuming you are in the happy camp, what do you intend to do for food after all the software engineers have been replaced? The only people I can imagine as happy are those who are either close to retirement or wealthy enough to live off savings/investments.
- juiceland 22d agoOverpaid techies learning they’re still just as much a means to the capital class’ ends as the factory workers whose jobs the US shipped to lower wage countries. Class consciousness y’all. You’re smart enough to Marx and Piketty so do it.
- gbanfalvi 22d agoBut why organize and risk getting a few of us fired when we can just wait and do nothing comfortably?
- dominotw 22d ago> Overpaid techies boot tasting connoisseur is always safe from any automation.
- cmrdporcupine 22d agoRight now it's almost inverse of this though. I'm sitting here with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, paying pennies to hammer out on projects that I have wanted to do for years but no employer would pay me to do. And should those pennies become difficult to spend or the API taken away from me, I have a DGX Spark on my desk I can run local models on to get the same thing done, just slower. It's somewhat the opposite of the concentration of the ownership of the means of production that the old bearded man spoke of. (And I do like my Marx, honestly). That said, yes, this does have the effect of potentially devaluing the work generally and droppings its compensation rates. Though I'm not sure we've hit that yet. So far places I've been working just pay me the same to get more done.
- juiceland 22d agoMarx did envision the atomization of labor, of individual entrepreneurs selling their own slice of the means of production. I am skeptical that such a system will result in better living conditions for workers. It hasn’t worked for Uber drivers.
- newtonianrules 22d ago
- throwaway1921 22d agoI was just having this conversation with someone. It's less sadness for me and more dread though. All of the sudden, everyone's technical expertise and the things that they spent their life getting good at, are accessible by everyone. I don't know if this makes sense as a society. Say whatever about what it means ethically, legally, etc., but I'm not sure this kind of thing is sustainable in the long run for a functioning society.
- sinsterizme 22d agoIt only doesn’t make sense with our current economic framework. I think we need UBI soon or we risk having a massive crisis
- ungovernableCat 22d agoIt's a bit more grim than that. It's accessible yes, but ultimately it's concentrated in a few AI labs and handed out at their grace. What happens when the race is won and then there's no need to compete anymore? What happens when top expertise is monopolised?
- abnry 22d agoI did well in school and the praise I received for excelling in my math degree did shape my life and impact my motivations. I do like praise. But outside of social reasons, it's understanding I crave. Thoroughly understanding a topic is awesome. I remember the feeling of acing my qualifier exam in grad school. Those LLMs change nothing fundamentally about this motivation and need and capability. I can't type a prompt, hazily skim the wall of text, and come to comprehensive understanding. I still have to work. What I like about LLMs is that they can increase my understanding by helping me learn more efficiently. What I don't like is the temptation to turn off my brain.
- forinti 22d agoThis week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it. I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out. AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.
- ohyes 22d agoAI providers are in fact incentivized to have you not think about the task. I’ve found that they automatically do more for you, and frankly, a lot of the time I don’t want it to do more for me. Ask me a question rather than burning a bunch of tokens to answer something I already know of the top of my head.
- bornfreddy 22d agoThe agents also overload you with walls of text, always including lots of less relevant information. It's like they want you to give up and let them drive.
- jeppester 22d agoExactly. I feel that agentic programming is largely turning what would have in the past been actual understanding into some kind of fluffy superficial pseudo "understanding" that's only barely good enough when assisted by AI.
- datakan 22d agoMy son told me yesterday he wants to program video games for a living. He's 13. He's looking at how it used to be done and seeing the pride people had in doing it. He hasn't seen how it is now. Not sure I have the heart to tell him how terrible the industry has become. Feels like telling a kid 30 years ago that being an astronaut is pointless because they no longer go to the moon.
- pram 22d agoIDK man it’s a golden era for one-man indie games right now (I just finished Endacopia) and that can only increase with AI assistance. I wouldn’t be too cynical about it
- datakan 22d agoYou may be right, I really don't know. I can't control the ocean, all I can do is learn to surf. I use the tools, bring home the check and go about my life. I just feel terrible for the people following after me who wont get to experience what I did. Maybe it's for the best, maybe not. Time will ultimately tell I suppose.
- cmrdporcupine 22d agoI have been surfing the wave since the 80s and all I can say is as cool as things have been through all of micro-computing history, I have no desire to return to the brutal tooling we had back then. And while the LLM-wave is more of a step function than linear growth like before, it's still a continuation of this which has been going on since I first touched a 6502: I can, with the newer tools, do more and get more done, and it lets me move further up the decision making matrix. That does mean there is/will-be a deluge of slop and uninteresting "stuff" out there, and the problem now becomes producing things which are capable of standing out from the crowd. Something I'm not super good at. But I see no point in valorizing the old tools and ways of doing things. Identify with the product, and the end goal. Not the tools used to get there.
- AlpacaJones 22d ago
- david927 22d agoThe thing you love and made your identity was always the cruft middleman of getting from one place to another. People were sad when we moved from horses to cars; they loved their horses, they named them. That didn't stop the slow, glacial, detached march of the calendar, of progress, and in this example, of the wheel.
- ungovernableCat 22d agowere the horses sad too?
- ploden 22d agoExcellent post. How many careers and industries has software killed? Now it’s our turn. We sold out for crypto scams and toxic social media and surveillance capitalism. We deserve zero sympathy.
- californical 22d ago> We sold out for crypto scams and toxic social media and surveillance capitalism Eh maybe you did, I and a bunch of people that I know have worked in companies that build software that genuinely helps people and improves their lives - either by simplifying something that sucked for them or by just improving inefficient industries and giving people new abilities. I don’t feel that way about anything I’ve worked on in my 20 years of building software
- Uehreka 22d ago> We sold out for crypto scams and toxic social media and surveillance capitalism. We deserve zero sympathy. “We”? I didn’t work on any of those things, in fact many of us didn’t. Those of us living outside the bay area making under $200k/yr (likely the majority of HN, definitely the vast majority of the industry) have no responsibility to shoulder the blame for the people who got rich doing that stuff.
- postalcoder 22d agoKudos to the author for being so vulnerable. The video presentation format is quite intimate, and a very different feeling than you'd get from a youtube video.
- sidrag22 22d agoI take issue with a ton of youtube style articles, and this video is an example of a version of youtube video essays done like a literal essay instead. It seems very much to me like video essay format on youtube is being used as a crutch. You can pump out your rough draft and hide it behind visuals or whatever else, and you benefit from the longer run time, and the viewer likely hangs around. You can't do that in an essay, if you lose the reader for a paragraph or two, they're likely gone. To me that is why this reads more intimate, its an essay crafted as a video and an essay which i LOVE, i want the choice, and almost no youtube essay or whatever you want to call them would give that choice because it is so filled with filler content hiding the rough edges.
- spijdar 22d agoThis strikes a chord with me, though I came to a somewhat different endpoint, at least for now. My perspective (so far) is that it was probably never a good thing for me to tie up my identity/sense of self in my ability to write moderately clever and generally mediocre code. I do still enjoy writing my moderately clever and generally mediocre code, and for the sake of my sanity, I'm trying to do more of it. But either way, I don't think it was never a good viewpoint to make me self-conception pivot around my ability to be useful by writing code, and maybe it's a good thing that LLMs have crushed my ego on that front.
- xp84 22d agoRelatable. I've taken advantage, in my career, of my aptitude to learn how moderately-complex systems are put together and my problem-solving instincts which are honestly nothing genius level. Just methodical and grounded. Someone created a bot which takes a bug report, checks logs, the database, and the code, and writes a write-up of what the problem is, complete with how to confirm or refute the hypothesis, and a description of what would need to be done to fix it (including any data fixes). Following these plans is very effective 90% of the time. Now, as a manager, I have to hurry up and get better at a lot of other things because in my opinion a lot of why I was usually kept around was because I was so good at knowing how things worked well enough to explain things like that, or to help validate new tech design. Plus I have to learn how to use AI effectively myself.
- sweetheart 22d agoCame here to share the same general idea about using this as an opportunity to recognize when we've based our sense of self-worth on something external, and therefore out of our control and unstable. Which I also hope wouldn't come across as patronizing, though I can see how popping into the comments to say "I hear you're sad, but it's actually because you've failed at understanding yourself!" is far from seeming helpful lol. But the author uses a lot of language that directly signals this. I'm navigating the same feelings as the author, though maybe to a lesser degree partially because I had to kind of reckon with this last year due to being laid off and burnt out. The thing that's helped the most by FAR is challenging myself to reframe my sense of self around things that being a Software Engineer was a mere _manifestation_ of, like being curious, creative, going deep on technical problems, trying to optimize things, etc. There are infinite ways to embody those tenets, and it helps to make the changes to our industry feel less existential without requiring me to feel like a different person, someone without a place.
- flyingshelf 22d agoThis is basically me in 2026. Life has no meaning and I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it. Hopefully I can find a job that doesn't bore me but I'm not positive.
- bsoqk 22d agoIt’s interesting to me that people find so much meaning in their jobs. To me work is just the means to obtain the money I need to actually live my life.
- sinsterizme 22d agoI think most people happy with their lives find meaning in their work. There’s studies on men’s happiness in particular being predominantly based on work satisfaction https://s3.amazonaws.com/harrys-cdnx-prod/manual/Harry%27s+Masculinity+Report%2C+USA+2018.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/harrys-cdnx-prod/manual/Harry%27s+M...
- xp84 22d agoAs someone who has spent my currently almost 20-year career building stuff in companies - and whole verticals - I don't care about at all, I agree mostly. As long as they're still going to pay me (GIANT hopeful assumption there) I'll supervise a 'team' of Claudes or whatever and don't really mind because I was just writing boring-ass corporate software. If I can get enough money to retire before it's too late, I won't miss work at all. Unfortunately I am not sure the 'tech' industry will have a lot of use for me, pretty soon.
- flyingshelf 21d ago> Unfortunately I am not sure the 'tech' industry will have a lot of use for me, pretty soon. That's the core issue. Our time is running out pretty soon anyway. I have no intention of downgrading my lifestyle to the point of near homelessness, better be dead.
- ijidak 22d agoNo. Please don't think that way. I don't know how to reach you personally, but please take a look at this article: https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/suicidal-thoughts-want-to-die/ https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/suicidal-tho... I pray it helps you. We're much more than any economic system. The sun still shines. There's a lot out in the world to see. Even in the worst case scenario, that we're all jobless. There are mountains to explore. Beaches to walk. Forests to camp in. I don't know where this all is headed. But, I do know each human has value. Your value is far greater than any job, skill, or the number of green pieces of paper you have. Feel free to reach out to me directly.
- alexambarch 22d agoIt’s been hard for me to overcome the feeling that anything I can do, the machine can do better and faster. I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that part for me. Yes it’s still a hobby I can do on the side, but at my day job it’s just sucked all the energy out of me.
- brokencode 22d agoI think that’s going to be one of the biggest impacts of AI in society. We will need to find new ways to occupy our time and find meaning in life once machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper. What will it look like? Will everybody spend their time playing sports and games? Or on art? Perhaps exploring the solar system or beyond if our technology advances enough? Quite a time to be alive to even have to think of such things outside of science fiction.
- xp84 22d agoSuper optimistic take, unfortunately. Even I as an economic conservative, have serious reservations about our economic system going into this revolution. It's not that capitalism, money, etc. is a broken system or something. But I think we're foolish if we assume that our current framework can simply adapt to absolutely any eventuality and any massive change in assumptions. I do believe that it's like the best possible train, where the rails are scarcity and human nature. But massive changes to scarcity will have weird-ass effects on the train, and we've unfortunately gotten here in a time where the West has so much dispute going on that I just can't see an organized and smart reorganization of our lives, or even smart adjustments being made. Two political factions are instead going to be screwing around trying to seize maximum power and sabotaging everything to make the other party look bad.
- maedla 22d agoLarge swaths of the population have more free time than ever before and they spend most of it scrolling. I am pessimistic
- darkwi11ow 22d agoLlm is a tool. Programming had used lots of tools through the history. Programming itself, is a tool for societal change. Building identity around it is ridiculous, I believe much healthier identity building is around what you can do with programming, rather about the fact of programming. Just my two cents
- Quarrelsome 22d ago> I think I've felt sad because of the disrespect. How is this to do with AI? When were we ever respected as an profession? My career has given me considerable experience of non-technical people in senior positions having limited respect for those with technical skills and running roughshod over their interests. The exceptions to this rule were mostly either theatre or a fortunate consequence of people like us getting into those senior roles. That's not even beginning to count all the masses incapable of perceiving us. Consider the outpouring of hatred for AI over artists and the scant sympathy for any of us. The sorrow is mostly the status quo returning in typical money driven orgs. If you read stories of the 80s then technical staff were incredibly poorly treated and paid and those voices will rise again, empowered by their hubris and slop. The only positive is now its easier to replicate the conditions of those orgs as you don't need to shell out over $100k per annum for a dev, given that these tools are considerably cheaper. This means we could compete with those forces without needing their pockets. We could even collaborate and somewhat destroy all those companies. However we wont because we're more interested in little puzzle boxes and arguing at great length about what something should be called until finally agreeing upon one of the very worst options.
- kenjackson 22d agoGood essay. The author seems to recognize his hypocrisy and why there won't be a lot of sympathy from society. As someone who wrote his first program in 1980, I've actually been really excited about AI. This morning I already wrote two web apps for my kids. I was never a web developer, so I most of the dev work I did was in the service of backends or low level stuff -- but I rarely ever connected it to anything I could use day to day. Now I write programs daily that I use. An example from this morning, my son is working through a workbook, but the answers are all on one page, but its hard to look at an answer and not see other answers. So I made a simple web page where you give the problem number and it gives you the answer. Super simple, but ended up being exactly what he needed. I'm finding that I'm just crafting up these 5 minute to 60 minute projects several times per day. Things where in the past I'd just say, "too bad" -- now I'm like... "hmm... what does a solution to this look like?!" So I'm not writing much code any more, but I don't know if I'm having any less fun.
- hax0ron3 22d agoI enjoy working on personal projects, but I have never enjoyed coding in professional contexts, so AI doesn't actually reduce my level of enjoyment at work at all. It actually increases my level of enjoyment, since it does a good job of handling what to me are the most boring aspects of professional coding: writing boilerplate, remembering nuances of language syntax and APIs, etc... and allows me to focus on what to me is more interesting: architecture, ideas, business strategy, etc.
- bitpush 22d agoTwo things can be true at the same time. 1. It is clear that many people, including the person in the video, has strong identities tied to a certain skill that they have spent years honing and perfecting. The sudden loss of agency and democratization can be confusing, disorienting and frankly demotivating. We need to acknowledge that. 2. Unfortunately, this has played out several hundreds of times over the years in the world. I'll take an extreme example to illustrate the point. Movie stars. There was well trodden path of getting to stardom and adulation, and everthing that comes with it. You move to LA, you work on your acting skills, you take your body aesthetics seiously and with plenty of luck, you might get cast in small roles before you work your way upto stardom. And the riches that come with it, cars, fans, brand deals .. great. And then came internet and YouTube where a guy in basement can garner millions of views, brand deals, fans in millions with little to no effort. This is the same pattern with an accomplished musician (think a drummer) and someone who uses a drum machine software to drag and drop the "amen loop". Exact same pattern with broadcasters and internet-journalists. Yes it is demotivating, yes it is confusing but such is progress. Adapt or die. Its ruthless.
- Joel_Mckay 22d ago1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long. 2. Indeed, the invention of the Cotton gin was credited for prolonging the economics of US Slavery for another century. Those folks were probably upset for a good reason. It is a self correcting problem, as anything that could be scraped has already been stolen. Only the chat user data remains, and LLM are causing a 17% decline in core skills. Note too, there is a trivial counter-proof to recursive self-improvement theories that any child with calculus II can solve. No I won't warn them this time, as we are waiting to strip the data-centers for discount infrastructure. The market correction correlation with Shrek movie releases is undeniable, and June 2027 is closer than you think. =3
- bitpush 22d ago> 1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long. I think about this a lot when I look at the roads, freeways and railroads of the world. In pursuit for building it, billions of trees have been cut down, land fundamentally shifted, rivers cut through, and wildlife uprooted. Yet, roads, freeways and railroads allow for growth. Someone facing medical emergency can reach a hospital on road because it exists. I get to eat fruits in winter because it is imported and transported to me from warmer places and/or storage units. Human progress and prosperity comes at a cost. Nothing in the world is free (perhaps maybe sunshine?) and the life that you're yearning pre-AI is also extremely tainted. Infact, you'll be hard pressed to find an era when human meddling hasnt had bad impact on the world (right from farming and domesticating animals).
- wizy 22d agostop calling them AI... those are LLMs so just statistical prediction software trained over other coders code... if no one makes code anymore then LLMs will learn from their own written code that statistically contains errors that will propagate and enter the feedback loop amplifying...
- unified101 22d agoThe loss of identity is quite destabilizing, and our industry is not doing enough to address it. For example, one thing we could do is move identity to value to the user, in a structured way. It is possible, but hardly any team is thinking about it.
- chasd00 22d agoUsing AI I can build more while listening to a conference call than i could with a week of evening coding sessions. Plus, i get to spend evenings with my kids. I kind of like it.
- reenorap 22d agoI feel the opposite of sad, I am very very excited. I love programming and I love technology, but the stuff I'm doing now is beyond what I could not do on my own, and now I'm spending a few hours building complete end-to-end stuff. This is the golden age for builders. I created a fully working house simulator, I made a math test creator for my kids, I fixed up some other side projects that I had and added observability, as well as installed Prometheus and Grafana and built grafana dashboards all using AI. It's wonderful. I plan on building real-time stock price monitors with personalized alerting, taking images from my security cameras and making time lapse videos, trying to do real time predictions on football games/individual plays by having AI monitor the game and based on previous history predict plays/outcomes specifically for sports betting. I need to find the time to figure out how to do all this stuff but what used to be a pipe dream is now 100% possible and accomplishable within days.
- Primer81 22d agoThis is exactly how I feel. I can roughly understand why people feel sad, but I cannot relate. I feel more capable than ever before and am simply excited. LLMs have been a great learned tool for me especially to venture into new programming domains in my personal projects.
- sigbottle 22d agoFor me, I've honestly never been much of an engineering builder - I'm focused on learning for myself. Which is useful - AI has accelerated that a ton - but it's still bottlenecked by, unfortunately, me. I should probably look broader...
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- Xenoamorphous 22d agoI think the “I’m sad” camp are mainly worried about their livelihood. You’re having fun but all of those things you listed are mere hobbies that won’t generate any money, particularly in a world where the next guy can spin up some AI agent, point to whatever you built and ask it “build me this”.
- augment_me 22d agoThis points to the bigger issue of people tying their value and identity to their livelihood. There is way too much clout, ego and identity chasing going on in all informational fields. If you instead identified as a parent, as a hobbyist programmer, as a rock climber, as a learner, as a meditator, in essence as anything that is not directly tied to your occupation, you don't have anything to worry or be sad about. This is hard, capitalism has forced us to identify with occupations, and then when it gets automated you feel a loss. But it's inevitable that this will need to be the outcome, so the sooner you start building an identity outside of your livelihood the sooner you will feel at peace.
- gh0stcat 22d agoFunny enough, it was what programming had turned into just before the onset of rapid AI adoption that drove me to find my identity and meaning outside of the hobby and work. It took me a long time! I'm only now feeling more confident about it and it's been years. Definitely worthwhile though.
- Analemma_ 22d agoThis is true as far as it goes but it's very difficult to do that when you're also anxious about material deprivation from losing your job. It's hard enough to construct a new source of self-identity when you're secure, doing it amid the thread of deprivation is even worse (and no, I don't trust the "it'll be ok even if there are mass layoffs because something something UBI" claims, that flies against everything we know about how elites have behaved for all of civilization)
- ungovernableCat 22d ago>you don't have anything to worry or be sad about Except you know, if you lose your occupation feeding the kids and paying for a roof over their head becomes a bit difficult.
- augment_me 22d agoIncome loss is a different question, it's not about your identity, which is what the post is about.
- devindotcom 22d agoI appreciate this sentiment and I'll add that, as a writer, I've encountered and experienced it myself and among creative friends. The notion that a model can produce text, or images, that resemble our output is certainly dispiriting in some ways. But it also is empowering when you realize that what you create, and the way you feel when you do it, is independent of that. I don't write to put machines in their place - I do it because I like it, and because I want to manifest my ideas in a way that is uniquely my own. I don't really care that a machine may produce a book. That book simply has no value to me and I hope that over time, as the novelty of this form of semantic reproduction wears off, others will share that estimation.
- shizumu 22d ago[dead]
- jatindavis05 22d agoso you are sad becuase you will not be respected? tbh i don't think that is valid. same thing happened during the industrail revolution. Just move on to do what matters. if coding is taken away by a model then build the models yourself atleast what every you can do with your resources. The problem here is that you are reluctant to change and you cannot put the effort to change yourself. you are lazy. that is the problem. more than that is also could be procrastination.
- stellalo 22d agoI don’t think you can tell someone why they are sad, better than they can, can you?
- sidrag22 22d agoI think you're being overly harsh. I don't match his temperament at all because my first real skillset(WoW :D) was literally looked down on by society rather than admired, so if anything the contrast was confusing to me to have a skillset that has value. However i can't imagine if during my WoW days, overnight my role was suddenly just replaced with someone doing my role and 4 other roles highly automated, with just a general knowledge instead of an absurd depth into one role, and all my peers thought i was being lazy for not wanting to automate as well.
- simonw 22d agoI'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill any more, you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left, and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth. If you don't want your profession to change at all then you're going to have a tough time with this - but that's surely been true for the history of software engineering? Has there ever been any stability to the tools and language we use beyond about a five year time horizon? These changes are happening a bit faster, but if you chose software development as a passion you've opted into pretty frequent radical change from the start.
- slowin 22d ago> The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. I think it depends on the person. I've been waiting for AI since I first saw Wargames as a child. As soon as I saw that agents could code at or beyond my level, it felt like the entire world was unlocked. Now I can explore so many ideas that I was bottle-necked on with my own time to write the code before. I would consider myself a technologist and it's a very exciting time to explore what technology can do. I loved writing code, but mostly because creating something that tapped the power of tech was my goal. Now I can achieve that goal 100x and it feels like a superpower.
- qarl 22d ago> it feels like a superpower I say "it feels like flying." People worry that I'm too enthusiastic about AI. My obvious answer is - wouldn't you love to fly too?
- derac 22d agoI think more people being able to create software to solve their needs is good. You're describing egoism, that you aren't special anymore because your identity is based on external validation, that this "hard" thing you do is accessible to anyone now. I don't think that's a good impulse.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 22d agoI'm too sad about recipe sites to empathize.
- wateralien 22d agoMaking any external thing one's identity is a recipe for disaster when it goes away.
- johnwheeler 22d agoI appreciate the honesty here. He talks about how programming became part of his identity, how being good at it earned him respect, and how it gave him a sense that he was providing something valuable. But here’s the deal: 1. The world does not give two fucks about our need to feel a certain way. 2. AI is not going anywhere. The world ultimately cares about the value you provide. I think it’s deeply egotistical to believe that when someone hires you, part of the arrangement is that they’re supposed to preserve your sense of superiority because you possess some skill other people don’t. For a long time, intelligence and specialized knowledge created scarcity. Increasingly, they don’t. Raw intellectual capability is becoming a commodity, and a lot of the gatekeeping built around it is disappearing. What matters more now is taste. Judgment. Knowing what is worth building. Having the will to push something valuable into the world. Knowing when something is good, when it isn’t, and what needs to happen next. I’ve worked with too many people over the years who made terrible decisions for no reason other than that the alternative bruised their ego or threatened their livelihood. Ironically, these were often the same people who prided themselves on being rational and objective. In reality, they were anything but. That’s one of the things I find so compelling about AI. It strips away a lot of the mythology around being the smartest person in the room and highlights what I’ve always believed matters most: Did you create value? Not your identity. Not your status. Not your need to feel special. The value you actually put into the world.
- luxuryballs 22d agoThis feels a little cold to say but I think AI psychosis goes two directions, maybe more, but at least there's a spectrum of "I am unstoppable" and "I am sad", I am currently at some mix of "this feels overhyped" and "ok so merely building something was never the ticket" with a hint of "I can see how this will play out" in two scary ways: once the orchestration ramps up, people will be replaced, or at least better allocated just like any breakthrough, ie vintage rooms full of people clacking on typewriters, but only for low hanging fruit things at first, it could go the opposite way for critical things like planes vs marketing websites since they are pushing a lot of fear mongering about AI in the media, people in powerful places could cause a lot of damage and use AI as an excuse that people will believe, just like a new virtual "ISIS" and other than the damage they will def use it as a justification for new laws and invasive controls, possibly to eliminate the anonymous web, and definitely to control the spread of information, that to me is the biggest threat of "AI" currently (and it's not even AI at all)
- enraged_camel 22d ago>> I think I've felt sad because of the disrespect. For most of my life I have loved programming: I've made it my hobby, my work, my identity. I made it my way of proving I have value, because I can be good at something, and improve at something, and it is useful, and beautiful: you can make cool things, and those things can be made in ways that are like craft or art or science or Maths. Yeah... don't do that. Don't make your job or career the center of your identity. You have to form and then internalize the belief that you are valuable not because you can offer value to others in a material sense, but rather in an intrinsic sense. You have experiences that nobody else has. You have meaning to others in your life, whether deep or not. Your thoughts and perspectives are unique to you. That is your real value.
- swish-mish 22d ago> You have to form and then internalize the belief that you are valuable not because you can offer value to others in a material sense, but rather in an intrinsic sense. Yes I’m sure you’re empty stomach will be greatly comforted by your “intrinsic sense of value”. > Your thoughts and perspectives are unique to you. That is your real value. Every snowflake is unique. It doesn’t make them valuable. It doesn’t stop me from blasting them with a snow blower when they’re deemed inconvenient and in the way.
- smalltorch 22d agoTangentially, attaching a video of yourself reading your own blogpost is a really great format.
- Cyan488 21d agoI fall into the AI sad camp, partly because my mind sees this comment and immediately jumps to: "What a great way to train an AI to imitate your voice, likeness and style all at once."
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- BeetleB 22d ago> I know a lot of people could be watching this and thinking, "where were you when they disrespected me?" How much respect is given to the work of farmers or nurses or drivers or parents or carers or teachers or hospitality workers or cleaners or car-washers or so many other people? I know, I am late to the party, but I've arrived now. My thoughts exactly, and not just for "low level" workers. Ask people who decided to get PhDs in the sciences. While some definitely "succeed" and are happy, the general disrespect they get at many work places really stings, and is in fact the reason people like me left those fields to go into SW. Life has been so much better as a SW engineer - both in terms of pay and in terms of how I'm treated. Rather than making this a sad note, I would encourage the OP to feel grateful he got this far without feeling crappy. He was truly blessed.
- stickfigure 22d agoI love programming and I have the exact opposite experience. AI has made programming even more fun. * I love programming, not typing. I type less! * I get to pick and choose which parts of the code to focus on. I hate spending hours on stupid CSS alignment issues, now I don't have to. * I'm working at 10X+ the speed I used to. It feels more like "moving at the speed of thought". * The penalty for going down technological dead ends is much lighter. It's worth trying some architectures that might not work out; you can refactor them away without a big time investment. I'm having way more fun than I ever did, and I always had a great time writing code. But I'm still in the code and nitpicking every decision the LLMs make.
- 1attice 22d ago> I know a lot of people could be watching this and thinking, "where were you when they disrespected me?" How much respect is given to the work of farmers or nurses or drivers or parents or carers or teachers or hospitality workers or cleaners or car-washers or so many other people? I know, I am late to the party, but I've arrived now. > It was a shock to me that bosses were so keen to ditch people like me and replace us with an imitation. How naive I was, and how self-centred. The labour movement arrives, belatedly, in the tech industry
- bluepeter 22d agoAI doomerism makes me sad, especially when it keeps popping up even in HN and Reddit tech threads. I can't help but see even this post itself as a kind of AI doomerism. Here we have the greatest innovation I've seen in my career... It's such a game-changer for me personally, and I can't wait to see what happens. But the anti-data center and anti-AI voices are rising, rising. I know that over-regulation is a real risk that can stifle that innovation and all its benefits really fast. I can't help but see the parallels to the nuclear debate from decades ago. The difference now is that we already have millions (billions?) of people using AI, and yet we haven't had widespread disaster. That's not to say that it can't happen, but it feels like we are battling an invisible demon that never shows itself. At the same time, my 15 year old son coded 3 ROblox apps this summer... he said, this can't be coding. It sure is, I said, you are coding and revel in it because you're on the vanguard. He was so excited and so am I.
- VCFundedGenYer 22d agoIt is not a game changer for anyone, yourself included. That is the fallacy - you think this is some amazing thing when it isn't. You're experiencing AI psychosis.
- mchusma 22d agoI have a different perspective. Most of the world is software. The US Constitution is software. Companies are software. With AI, we can build so much more software, its incredible! How these systems are architected are complicated. Sure, if you really loved coding at an extreme low level, that may go away. But I think there is 10x more software engineering going on my company (and in my personal life). Things change, but things are more fun than ever.
- esafak 22d agoThis person is responding sensibly. I wish him well. What remains to be done is to accept that change has come, and take part in shaping the future. As for programming I am getting more done than ever before; I just outsource the implementation. Honestly I feel like I'm flying. I understand the poster felt that the implementation was the part he enjoyed. Experts are still needed to use AI for coding well; a PM isn't going to get the same mileage as he is, so take comfort in that.
- lf88 22d agoIt's very sad, indeed. And I am afraid that, on the current trajectory, this tragedy will extend to all cognitive activities, including the most fulfilling. This is not the future I was dreaming for. This is not the world I want to inhabit. But I have some hope, because I see a mounting awareness that the future we are heading to is not the best one for humanity. For the record, I still do all my coding without using any LLM.
- erqtw1 22d agoI know a lot of people could be watching this and thinking, "where were you when they disrespected me?" - I was flagged in 2018 when I said DEI is industry propaganda to divide and conquer. This is now accepted. - I was flagged when they told coal miners to "learn how to code" because that was industry propaganda. - I was flagged when I said bitcoin is for money laundering. So the people with flagging power never cared, yes. The users are also at fault: There are many mainstream articles about tracking and personal data abuse, and they don't care. Even mathematicians needed to be hit on the nose to find out that research theft via prompts is real.
- slater 22d ago> DEI is industry propaganda to divide and conquer. This is now accepted. Neither true, nor accepted.
- thatmf 22d agoSame. My spouse and I were recently at a pizza place that had one of those arcade tables with Mrs Pacman, Donkey Kong etc. As we were sitting there eating I started getting pretty animated talking about what amazing technical achievements these games were, and how clever and resourceful it required the developers/artists to be due to the constraints they were working with. That cleverness is what first drew me, as a young smart-ass, to being creative and building things with computers and hardware. Transcending limitations. But now you don't need to be clever. And that's what fucking sucks. Yes, I can 100x or whatever my output. Who cares? Well, the people with the money care. The delusional accelerationist types with god complexes. The types that will sell out their fellow worker to VC because they believe themselves to be somehow above it or if I don't do it someone else will etc. Fuck all of those people. I mean, they've always been here, or even necessary. But there used to be at least some sort of balance between labor/creativity and... them. That balance is now gone. The thing is- yes you still can be clever with these tools. But the motivations aren't the same. You can get something perfectly acceptable without it. The imperative is no longer there. And maybe this is me realizing how lazy I am (aren't all good programmers?) But another word for "imperative" in this context is "purpose". And well, I guess I'm just glad to be old enough now that I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and I can sort of see the exit sign from here, and I'm learning to be clever in other domains that haven't been drained by LLMs yet. So yeah. Feels bad man.
- ajdegol 22d agoIf you’ve been in the software game long enough then you can recount days or weeks tracking down a particularly tricky bug that was resolved by a single line of code. That’s because software engineering is not about the amount of code you write: it’s about problem solving. So then logically, either: - there are problems still to solve and you can work to solve them (maybe with AI) - there are no problems. So let’s head to the beach, as there are no problems.
- mindwok 22d agoKudos to the author for sharing a candid and vulnerable post. I think we're all grieving right now for the things we loved: programming itself, open source software and the community around it, high salaries and high status jobs with crazy bargaining power. I think many are still in the denial phase, but it's getting harder to deny being in tech is basically unrecognisable to what it was even 4 years ago. For those of you feeling the grief, have hope that just like programming and the world it created gave you purpose, community, money, etc - something else will come in time.
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- CookieCrisp 22d agoOne of my early programming jobs was bringing a print newspaper to the web. I was actually going through some of my emails from that time yesterday, which brought back a lot of memories. I was largely despised by most of the staff. Some told me the internet was a fad, others assumed I thought I was better than them. The editor kept insecurely saying “I know you think I’m a dinosaur and don’t want to hear what I have to say but…” the thing is… I didn’t think they were dinosaurs at all. I had enormous respect for them (it’s why I applied!), I knew the internet was inevitable and wanted to salvage as much as I could of what I loved. The internet did change their industry and the world. Many of them did lose their jobs. That is what technology does. Efficiencies mean someone somewhere is no longer needed. That was hard for me to accept for a long time, but if you have programmed professionally long enough you have almost definitely indirectly contributed to some job loss. (And new jobs as well! But… to the people who do lose their jobs, there is little comfort in that) I think what is worth keeping in mind though is 1) wishing something away wont make it so, so it is best to do your best to avoid putting your head in the sand, and 2) while many many people will be completely uprooted (sometimes in miserable ways) that is not at all a statement about them. The journalists of before were and are still incredible people, the brick layers too. Us doing work that wasn’t automatable before did not make us better than them, or even more creative than them.
- waffletower 22d agoIt is so painful to read, and it reminds me of my sadness, which is altogether different. For me, AI has enabled both learning and engineering to an unprecedented degree. I am sad that more technologists haven't experienced that -- haven't experienced the new concepts, the deeper understanding and exposure to mathematics, and the ability to explore intelligence at nearly any desired scale. AI has given me more time to think and plan my work. It gives significant altitude to projects. So sad to see how education and culture has discouraged many to use this tool to enrich their minds and expand what they are capable of producing; instead they focus on the false belief that using it is always cheating and it can only dull your thinking. You choose how to think. You choose how to use AI. If you aren't learning while using it, you might be doing it wrong.
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- landdate 22d agoI can't remember a time in my life where AI with an intelligence equal to or similar to the intelligence of a human didn't strike existential dread. Specifically, when I was around elementary school age I grew extremely depressed over the inevitability of AGI. The fundamental fear is that we, humans, are just a series of atoms. Our experience is not unique, and we don't have a specific purpose. It's nihilism. I would explain further, but none of you are worth the effort, if you were you would be committing domestic terrorism. Not touching urself to hug box opiate blog posta from half humans. I will say however, I quickly cured all my fears, by accepting God and the truth of the Holg Spirit and the soul that is beyond empirical judgement or reasoning.
- paulinho1 22d agoThis is what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket. For the sake of your life, do something meaningful outside of your work. This industry is full of nerdy geeks who think they're better than everybody else just because they can code a little better. This tendency makes the workplace often very toxic. It's hard to communicate about real problems without getting into politics. From my view, these unsocial behaviors finally caught up with those geek coders. You have no personality other than coding, and now that it's obsolete, you are just sad. Given how much disrespect I've gotten in this industry from this kind of people, this trend after AI makes me even feel happy. The industry really needs a huge change in people's attitude if it wants to survive beyond AI.
- hnedeotes 22d agoI personally don't understand what's bad about AI being able to do much of the route, boring, crappy parts of programming. The same way SAP, salesforce, etc were never good products from the point of view of a company, other than enabling a corporate workflow and legal compliance, that was needlessly complex, they still got used when for a fraction of the "subscription" + consultants a better more fit to purpose solution could have been built - much leaner and meaner and to the point, actually enabling empowerment of the company's staff and market differentiation. AI without proper guidance will be the same. Just a few days ago I checked out https://colonist.io https://colonist.io due to it having some open positions (saw here on hn "who's hiring"), it's all AI driven, but it looks and feels awful. Perhaps that's the original catan playing experience but I for sure wouldn't want future software to be like this. Even when using AI, even looking at that, I know it's possible to do much better with AI, it's just that it won't by itself so I don't think there will be a lack of opportunities for those that are into building stuff. It's actually amazing that an AI can guide me through a mountain of incongruent, difficult to use and understand without years of study, nerd interfaces and programming decisions others have made and allow me to try out a complete new OS (for instance microOS) and write a WebGL tile drawing engine. At the same time, it still stumbles with simple stuff, while at the same time being able to generate a JS + wasm tile game skeleton. But when you look at the skeleton it's actually not that amazing and you can see the training/stolen code leaking everywhere, things you didn't ask are there too, choices are made for things that weren't present in the specs/prompts when they weren't needed either... The upside is that it cost me $0.02. But to be decent I need to spec it properly. I need to know how and why it sucks, and how and why to make it not suck, even if when writing out a spec. I don't have a horse in this race, I know this architecture can't lead to AGI, it could theoretically solve programming (in absolute), but it doesn't seem so either due to the nature of LLMs. What will happen is that it will be "SAP/salesforce" software for everyone. To be honest, it mostly sucks already and that's not fault of the AI models. What I guess you won't be able to do is charge enough to pay your house on a business model of switching CSS colors, or doing wordpress updates, and pretending you're some sort of wizard and that pounding sand activity is worth what you were being paid. I think that those who want to build things will have way more leverage and reach than ever. Maybe not in a corporate environment - as the same **** that would tangle basic stuff into 2 weeks of work, instead of a single afternoon may actually be more savvy politically to keep their positions - but everywhere else it feels like it will be so. And even in other aspects. I paid a bit more than $3k to different artists as freelancers for getting in total less than 100 images for my game ($30-$45/img), of which, prior to finding an artist that was actually willing to listen and do what I asked, was about 70% not worth even the small amount I was paying. With that artist the rate of satisfaction went up, but still not always as I had envisioned. Some of the first artists I worked with were just plain stupid to work with even though I was paying them ok (taking into account their countries). With AI, even though it's mostly built out of stolen work, with a yearly sub to any of those image gen platforms, I did in 2 months more than 2k images of which maybe 1k was usable and I was way happier with them... for about $24. I left thousands of images in credits unused for about $120/year. There's just so many things that don't require an artist but instead adherence to a spec under a known guard-railed path. This does suck for the artist himself, it does suck for me too since my hourly rates got butchered too, but as a creator, this is all amazing - as long as we get local, free models. For the artists and programmers that were just milking it - well, you kinda prompted this, no pun intended.
- hajiboy 22d agoon the other hand I see a problem with the people's sentiment. especially at Plattforms like reddit. I am a huge fan of all this progress. write a few apps from the scratch and thought myself even new programming languages for it. nowadays the work shifts to a higher level. making decisions about architecture and so on. ofc there's always the pitfall of letting the AI rule but if you put brain effort in it, it's so much easier to get something that already works quite well how you imagined it. however on the other hand there are all those people who haven't used it, seeing all those new software project coming out of nowhere and can't really judge how much work is behind a tool or not. people start rage bait like crazy even up to an amount that people already told me they've left reddit because of all this negativity. ofc many things are vibe coded. exactly those things which can be done quickly quite good and which the person in charge may not be the very best person. the problem is that people can't judge the architecture behind it and start calling almost everything AI slop.... sad times
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- the13 22d agoThis dinosaur is obsolete because people who know how to program AND learn AI tools will have jobs and he won't. Learn to Claude.
- VCFundedGenYer 22d agoI'm just sad that the overwhelming majority has resorted to using AI in terrible ways. Case in point, last night, I saw a flyer with the US flag. It contained at least 55 stars, and the bottom row was cut off at the bottom. Nobody even reviews this stuff anymore, and don't even for one second tell me people will get better at it - they won't. You're living in an absolute bubble if you think AI is a net benefit for society. Our AI team at my org doesn't even know how to write half decent prompts. They just show us how to make Corgi pictures in every meeting. When you actually challenge them to use LLMs in real ways, they crap their pants or tell you that you're out of scope. Executives are the same way, they push AI on everyone but have no clue how to actually use it in a practical setting (because there probably isn't a way)
- WhatsTheBigIdea 22d agoI fully understand your sadness. The world is changing quickly and it is not clear how things will shake out. It feels like I can control or effect close to none of it. On the bright side, you are clearly smart, literate, capable, thoughtful, high-functioning, analytical, caring and alive! You've got a lot to work with! Adaptation is almost always driven by discomfort. It is sad to see the things and the life we love going away. Keep your chin up, be good to yourself and the people around you, stay flexible, and just keep landing on your feet... over and over... and don't stop. 25 years ago I woke up from the sound of the first plane hitting. I watched people jump to their deaths. I watched, heard, felt, smelled the towers fall. I lost very good friends. One was an SWE working in tower 1. It sucked. It made me realize that each day is a gift. Even the days that don't go your way. One foot in front of the other. Just keep working to bring your light to the world and you will be fine.
- JeremyHerrman 22d agoAI can be a tool for the software craftsman too! Just keep a high bar for quality at whatever abstraction level you're working at - whether that's machine code, assembly, low or high level languages, or even wrangling agents. I've been coding for 25 years and I've never been more excited and less sad to build projects I've been dreaming of but haven't had enough time to do.
- Xenoamorphous 22d agoI see two groups of optimistic people about all this. First, the “OMG I’ve always been a builder, I’m having so much fun”. Yeah, building hobby projects. They’re called a hobby for a reason, they are not means to sustain yourself or your loved ones, particularly when the guy next to you can spin up an AI agent and ask “build me this”. Then the “coding was never the hard part/where I spent most of my time, engineering is still hard”. Yeah, maybe it still is, but for how long? 2 years? 3? Both strike me as naive and myopic, but I really wish I’m the one who’s wrong.
- aogaili 22d agoI griefed a bit myself for the effort I put to learn programming, I do enjoy the concepts and theories, it was playground for my mind. But the way I see it, is that I got a matching partner, that is also very good at programming. And there is a strange sense of excitement when I watch the LLMs struggle were I used to struggle and excel in many other areas I'm poor at. But I got into coding to build products/software that I can share with others, and this has accelerated, so that is also exciting, I decided to put the money and fear aside and do what I love..build things. "And if you can do it, people think you're clever, and respect you." - that is the main issue here..personally, in where I come from the work was never respected and also never paid well, so I always did it because I like to create/build and keep my mind engaged.
- jonjacky 22d agoThere is something else here to feel sad about, which is bigger than the effect of AI on the lives and careers of individual programmers. In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.
- luisgvv 22d agoYa'll overestimate how the average programmer uses LLMs and tools and underestimate how a good programmer uses them. Nothing is set in stone other than the fact the way software engineerind is done.
- JKCalhoun 22d ago"Now some people in our industry are telling us that programming is obsolete…" What Do You Care What Other People Think? —Feynman
- piloto_ciego 21d agoI don't know how much this helps you (or anyone else), but, yeah, I understand. I was a pilot. I lived flying. I loved flying. I loved flying more than myself even, and it was such a major part of my identity that the vestiges of that define many of my understandings of the world. Then I got sick. And I lost everything (except for my loved ones) trying to get better. And I rebuilt, and fostered a new identity. I went to grad school and studied CS and AI stuff. I built myself a new identity as a software engineer and stats dabbler. I published a paper or two and now I'm watching that identity evaporate as now I spend most of my time shepherding AI agents. But... I also learned the first time that my worth as a human being was not based on "what I did for money." I also learned that I was adaptable. I also learned that I could learn and change and grow and do so for the things I wanted to learn. I am the master of my fate. I'm the captain of my soul. The grief will pass, and when it does you will emerge better than you were before. Forged. I'm sorry you're going through this and that it makes you sad, but you'll need to adapt. You'll need to keep moving forward. You'll need to get a better definition of what you want to do in this changed world, because the reality is that the old universe is gone. It's never coming back. Mourn, but then get up and start to move through this new world. That's the only advice I have, I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better - but if you try to compete, you'll die like John Henry. Now, is time to adapt. You'll make it, you might not like it - but you'll be ok. After all, it's just a job.
- lerouxb 21d agoIt is pretty obvious to me that our industry will become regulated where you have to have a formal education, a multi-year internship and then certification that has legal requirements to keep and that it will be pushed for by our peers. THAT is what will ruin the industry for me. It will be like becoming a doctor, lawyer, electrician or plumber in most countries. With similar income caps.