Feeling Sad about AI

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It will be like becoming a doctor, lawyer, electrician or plumber in most countries. With similar income caps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the record, I still do all my coding without using any LLM.

Nothing is set in stone other than the fact the way software engineerind is done.

- 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.

> 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

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.

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.

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)

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

—Feynman

Just a few days ago I checked out 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Class consciousness y’all. You’re smart enough to Marx and Piketty so do it.

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.