This reflects many of the same things that I've been feeling. It's almost a feeling of grief at the lost of a career I really loved. Software engineering is starting to be unrecognizable to me.
Even if you're a solid software engineer and do your best to keep up in an AI world, you have to deal with all the indirect impacts that AI has had on collaboration, code quality, management decisions, product decisions, etc.
I don't have a solution and I'm really struggling to figure out what I want to do next. I've been unable to identify something that could provide me with income that hasn't been equally harmed by AI. I'm open to suggestions.
All that being said, I'd join such a support group
I don't like generative AI/LLMs. They strip the enjoyable parts out of the work and leave only the tedium, and they cannot be relied upon. Never mind that they're essentially large-scale open source license violators.
My employer has been encouraging us to use LLMs in our coding work, and I've been resisting, but their encouragement is rapidly converting into requirement. We have to start submitting reports from Claude showing how much we utilized it. I've been desperately wanting to return more of my time to writing, and this LLM push has been the last psychological shove I needed to start moving away from the industry[1].
I'm sure I'll still code for fun, and for my own projects, but I think I'm going to be done with day-job coding unless AI turns out to be a bubble and/or the upcoming unsubsidized price tags throw cold water on the whole enterprise. If I can't make a living with writing, I may have to open a Cajun food truck or something.
I'm feeling the same. I'm 21, basically just started my career.
Nothing felt better than writing code, and feeling proud of what I had built. Now I am being forced at work to use AI/LLMs because "it's faster" and I feel like my whole life, the career I fought for, has been sucked away.
Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...
You are too young to even remotely reliably assert cause. Things get less fun when you do them more often, and you’ll be facing the realities of ‘professional’ development, if you’ve even started doing that yet.
Be careful to not falsely attribute this to AI just because the chronically online kids are all up in arms about it.
I have also lost all sense of pride in my work. As well as all interest in learning anything new related to software, knowing it'll be of zero value to me personally. For many of us our job has always been a craft, being able to perfect our skills while delivering a product was part of the deal when working on a hard problem. All skilled workers who saw their job moved by the side of a conveyor belt in the past two centuries were alienated in the same way.
> interest in learning anything new related to software
I reckon the last large piece of technology I have learned is Kubernetes, and I doubt I’ll ever go any further.
On the other hand, I’ve sought some comfort in digital art, and learned a lot about Blender, level design, architecture, but it’s hard to feel like an impostor, after seeing myself as a programmer since I was in my teens. I wish I could find the strength and recklessness to just jump into the unknown and embrace a totally new career. I would have done it in a heartbeat in my 20s, now that I’m reaching 40 years old it is existentially terrifying.
Seems like the need for a support group depends on whether the recent advent of LLMs in your specific workplace has led you to become a Centaur ("I'm now a 10x SWE") or a Reverse Centaur ("this is rapidly sucking the joy this job once held for me"). So, yes, there is very definitely a need for this as there are definitely people seeing themselves cast as the latter.
We should rephrase the multipliers. We are not 10x whatever, we are x/10 cheaper now to the companies that hire us. That’s the correct frame. AI is not here to make the life of engineers better; AI is here for the delight of companies
I wouldn't consider myself an SWE, just an amateur programmer, so this is an honest question: In your opinion, is there such a case where the usage of AI in software engineering has either sped up the dev time or improved product reliability (or even both)?
> Millions of programmers out there, and you're saying there's not even a 1% chance that a single one of them is moving 10x faster
Would that mean that every other claim to be moving 10x faster is an exaggeration? It evidently is, as these claims of massively increased productivity are purely anecdotal.
If the claims were ‘5% productive across the board’, it would be huge, but 1000%? That is a ludicrous tall story that requires extraordinary proof.
I don't know if it's 10x, but there's definitely a huge acceleration in productivity. Attempts to deny that are basically just cope, or perhaps from people not using the tools correctly.
If I may ask: In what areas have you found the most acceleration in productivity? For me as an enthusiastic amateur programmer (whose enthusiasm is, arguably, greater than my technical abilities) the only reliable and sustainable way to use AI in building software is to treat it like an exceptionally knowledgeable (though not perfect!), infinitely patient tutor that guides me through programming problems I run into.
The minute I relinquish control and let it just write code for me I am doomed because AI cannot fix its own mistakes in anything of medium complexity or above - and then I have to dig down and try to understand code I haven't written which is, in my opinion, worse than having had to write it myself in the first place.
It's very good for bug fixes. I paste the log into the agent, and it has a good chance of suggesting the fix. I have to review it, but it has been a big time saver.
For new code, I treat it like a very knowledgeable mid level engineer who has a lot of patience to search the code base. We make changes a step at a time and I review them carefully and have it make changes I want. It's still a lot faster than doing it myself.
Someone was describing their time in Navy around the 70s or 80s. They’re job was to perform maintenance on some sort of electronic system on ship. They mentioned the training in electronic design repair they were given in the Navy and how good it was, setting them up for an EE degree later in life quite well.
They went on to describe that nowadays no one does that. That job now involves removing modular commercial off the shelf hardware components, sticking them on diagnostic machines and maybe ordering by a replacement or running a calibration. No useful technical skill or knowledge learned.
LLM driven development feels like a rough analog in software. Sure, there’s going to be new jobs created, they’ll just be less valuable and worse across almost every factor.
I could maybe be content with it if they didn’t just claw back remote work. Why the fuck should I still be sitting in an office hours a day when the agents do all the real work.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people in the same boat as you.
I was already getting annoyed with the profession and its CV-driven development, and mostly saw code as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but that only means I've not lost a sense of identity: I am absolutely also struggling to figure out what to do next.
Lots of people have very strong opinions about how code should look, often mutually incompatible with each other. Sometimes it's closer to cargo-culting a design pattern or other "best practice" than anything else, doing what they see others do without understanding why, even if they can emit words that are shaped like an explanation. On occasion, such people have made their preferences into my problem.
Because I'm relaxed about which style is used so long as it's not actively wrong, I'm also fairly relaxed about LLMs making code in a style I find weird… so long as it's not actively wrong, which it sometimes still is.
I'm sure a lot of engineers feel the same way, especially those who love programming and aren't just in it for the money. I have mixed feelings on the topic - on the one hand i'm quite happy not to write boilerplate code again and again, AI is good at that especially with the right instructions/skills so i'm not mad. It means that I think more in systems than in low-level code, and my cognitive load is lighter not having to remember all the details of different packages and libraries etc. I still enjoy the process of creating software, i'm just not as involved in the coding step. AI has also opened up a lot of opportunities to create things that would have taken me months, in a matter of days.
On the other hand I definitely feel like AI makes developers lazier, and if they're not properly reviewing the code it can have some disastrous consequences. It seems to have calmed down a bit but we went through a phase of swimming in a deluge of AI slop, I guess the temperature has been turned down a bit as I no longer get three emoji-filled documents for every change I introduce. It definitely feels like the last 30 years of my career have been swept away, but the past is gone and we can't get it back, and I have a wealth of experience that is still useful.
I don't know about other companies and industries but certainly the message from our leadership is that AI is here, and it's staying, so it's either a case of get on board or look for another job. I'm currently building AI augmented tools to stay relevant and hopefully survive the next round of job cuts.
I’m glad you started your long comment the way that you did, because It made it so easy to discount.
I find AI-assisted development to be quite enjoyable. I’ve logged many, many years of full-time development prior to LLMs hitting the scene. By every indication i’ve been given, I am very good at my job. I do not do this job for the money. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near SV, both physically or spiritually.
I am not a rare exception or anything. My whole team is like this. I work with many people that’re like this. There is no shortage of voices speaking to this online. You’re in denial.
Drop this “you probably just don’t love the craft if you aren’t on my side” BS. it was old six months ago. It’s inexcusably ignorant now. If your view had such merit you wouldn’t need to be this intellectually dishonest. Accept that different people are different.
What if one’s entire existence doesn’t revolve around the role they play in capitalist systems?
Comments like this make it blindingly apparent that this is just a VC’s web forum.
> What if one’s entire existence doesn’t revolve around the role they play in capitalist systems.
Quit playing for a little bit. Quit working. See how quickly people deride of devalue you. If I don’t work, I don’t eat, I don’t get a place to sleep, etc. and “the role I play in the capitalist system” determines exactly how much of those things I can have.
I find it similar to “it’s not useful to compare yourself to others” adage. In society, you’re constantly evaluated or compared against others: when trying to find work, when trying to find a home, etc.
Sure maybe you can fuck off and try and live like Diogenes, but you’ll more likely to just collect a string of arrests or unwanted conflict with junkies.
You are entirely defined by your role in the capitalist system because you cannot exist outside of it.
Take this vague, emotive, thought-terminating language to your journal or a pub rant or something. What does this even mean? Only one entity in this interaction has free will and it’s not the LLM. “Humanity reliant on another technology” is hardly news. You’re probably just getting a taste of your own medicine. Most people here have spent their careers at least ATTEMPTING to disrupt industries/areas of society in a way that makes people increasingly reliant on “technology”.
This reflects many of the same things that I've been feeling. It's almost a feeling of grief at the lost of a career I really loved. Software engineering is starting to be unrecognizable to me.
Even if you're a solid software engineer and do your best to keep up in an AI world, you have to deal with all the indirect impacts that AI has had on collaboration, code quality, management decisions, product decisions, etc.
I don't have a solution and I'm really struggling to figure out what I want to do next. I've been unable to identify something that could provide me with income that hasn't been equally harmed by AI. I'm open to suggestions.
All that being said, I'd join such a support group
I don't like generative AI/LLMs. They strip the enjoyable parts out of the work and leave only the tedium, and they cannot be relied upon. Never mind that they're essentially large-scale open source license violators.
My employer has been encouraging us to use LLMs in our coding work, and I've been resisting, but their encouragement is rapidly converting into requirement. We have to start submitting reports from Claude showing how much we utilized it. I've been desperately wanting to return more of my time to writing, and this LLM push has been the last psychological shove I needed to start moving away from the industry[1].
I'm sure I'll still code for fun, and for my own projects, but I think I'm going to be done with day-job coding unless AI turns out to be a bubble and/or the upcoming unsubsidized price tags throw cold water on the whole enterprise. If I can't make a living with writing, I may have to open a Cajun food truck or something.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847511
I'm feeling the same. I'm 21, basically just started my career.
Nothing felt better than writing code, and feeling proud of what I had built. Now I am being forced at work to use AI/LLMs because "it's faster" and I feel like my whole life, the career I fought for, has been sucked away.
Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...
You are too young to even remotely reliably assert cause. Things get less fun when you do them more often, and you’ll be facing the realities of ‘professional’ development, if you’ve even started doing that yet.
Be careful to not falsely attribute this to AI just because the chronically online kids are all up in arms about it.
I have also lost all sense of pride in my work. As well as all interest in learning anything new related to software, knowing it'll be of zero value to me personally. For many of us our job has always been a craft, being able to perfect our skills while delivering a product was part of the deal when working on a hard problem. All skilled workers who saw their job moved by the side of a conveyor belt in the past two centuries were alienated in the same way.
> interest in learning anything new related to software
I reckon the last large piece of technology I have learned is Kubernetes, and I doubt I’ll ever go any further.
On the other hand, I’ve sought some comfort in digital art, and learned a lot about Blender, level design, architecture, but it’s hard to feel like an impostor, after seeing myself as a programmer since I was in my teens. I wish I could find the strength and recklessness to just jump into the unknown and embrace a totally new career. I would have done it in a heartbeat in my 20s, now that I’m reaching 40 years old it is existentially terrifying.
Seems like the need for a support group depends on whether the recent advent of LLMs in your specific workplace has led you to become a Centaur ("I'm now a 10x SWE") or a Reverse Centaur ("this is rapidly sucking the joy this job once held for me"). So, yes, there is very definitely a need for this as there are definitely people seeing themselves cast as the latter.
We should rephrase the multipliers. We are not 10x whatever, we are x/10 cheaper now to the companies that hire us. That’s the correct frame. AI is not here to make the life of engineers better; AI is here for the delight of companies
The 10x Centaur doesn't exist. They're just ten times as fast at creating tech debt.
I wouldn't consider myself an SWE, just an amateur programmer, so this is an honest question: In your opinion, is there such a case where the usage of AI in software engineering has either sped up the dev time or improved product reliability (or even both)?
It can churn out boilerplate but we already had templates to do that.
It can translate one language into another but we already had transpilers for that.
It can find bugs quickly but we already had static analysis. It also generates many plausible looking false positives.
It's so intriguing to me how confidently people state this.
Millions of programmers out there, and you're saying there's not even a 1% chance that a single one of them is moving 10x faster?
> Millions of programmers out there, and you're saying there's not even a 1% chance that a single one of them is moving 10x faster
Would that mean that every other claim to be moving 10x faster is an exaggeration? It evidently is, as these claims of massively increased productivity are purely anecdotal.
If the claims were ‘5% productive across the board’, it would be huge, but 1000%? That is a ludicrous tall story that requires extraordinary proof.
Faster != more productive.
Written by a human != correct.
Never claimed it did
I don't know if it's 10x, but there's definitely a huge acceleration in productivity. Attempts to deny that are basically just cope, or perhaps from people not using the tools correctly.
If I may ask: In what areas have you found the most acceleration in productivity? For me as an enthusiastic amateur programmer (whose enthusiasm is, arguably, greater than my technical abilities) the only reliable and sustainable way to use AI in building software is to treat it like an exceptionally knowledgeable (though not perfect!), infinitely patient tutor that guides me through programming problems I run into. The minute I relinquish control and let it just write code for me I am doomed because AI cannot fix its own mistakes in anything of medium complexity or above - and then I have to dig down and try to understand code I haven't written which is, in my opinion, worse than having had to write it myself in the first place.
It's very good for bug fixes. I paste the log into the agent, and it has a good chance of suggesting the fix. I have to review it, but it has been a big time saver.
For new code, I treat it like a very knowledgeable mid level engineer who has a lot of patience to search the code base. We make changes a step at a time and I review them carefully and have it make changes I want. It's still a lot faster than doing it myself.
the first rule of LLM support group is you do not ask the LLM to summarize the support group meeting
I recall an HN post from some years back:
Someone was describing their time in Navy around the 70s or 80s. They’re job was to perform maintenance on some sort of electronic system on ship. They mentioned the training in electronic design repair they were given in the Navy and how good it was, setting them up for an EE degree later in life quite well.
They went on to describe that nowadays no one does that. That job now involves removing modular commercial off the shelf hardware components, sticking them on diagnostic machines and maybe ordering by a replacement or running a calibration. No useful technical skill or knowledge learned.
LLM driven development feels like a rough analog in software. Sure, there’s going to be new jobs created, they’ll just be less valuable and worse across almost every factor.
I could maybe be content with it if they didn’t just claw back remote work. Why the fuck should I still be sitting in an office hours a day when the agents do all the real work.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of people in the same boat as you.
I was already getting annoyed with the profession and its CV-driven development, and mostly saw code as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but that only means I've not lost a sense of identity: I am absolutely also struggling to figure out what to do next.
> means to an end rather
Is that not what writing code is for? achieving a need?
If I want to feel the art or gaze upon my code masterpieces, I'll do that in my own side projects, no?
Lots of people have very strong opinions about how code should look, often mutually incompatible with each other. Sometimes it's closer to cargo-culting a design pattern or other "best practice" than anything else, doing what they see others do without understanding why, even if they can emit words that are shaped like an explanation. On occasion, such people have made their preferences into my problem.
Because I'm relaxed about which style is used so long as it's not actively wrong, I'm also fairly relaxed about LLMs making code in a style I find weird… so long as it's not actively wrong, which it sometimes still is.
1. Create a support group
2. Create agents to crawl the internet and invite anyone who has posted such sentiments
3. Best not to tell them that they were contacted via ai
More seriously if you set one up, it will likely attract many people.
I'm sure a lot of engineers feel the same way, especially those who love programming and aren't just in it for the money. I have mixed feelings on the topic - on the one hand i'm quite happy not to write boilerplate code again and again, AI is good at that especially with the right instructions/skills so i'm not mad. It means that I think more in systems than in low-level code, and my cognitive load is lighter not having to remember all the details of different packages and libraries etc. I still enjoy the process of creating software, i'm just not as involved in the coding step. AI has also opened up a lot of opportunities to create things that would have taken me months, in a matter of days.
On the other hand I definitely feel like AI makes developers lazier, and if they're not properly reviewing the code it can have some disastrous consequences. It seems to have calmed down a bit but we went through a phase of swimming in a deluge of AI slop, I guess the temperature has been turned down a bit as I no longer get three emoji-filled documents for every change I introduce. It definitely feels like the last 30 years of my career have been swept away, but the past is gone and we can't get it back, and I have a wealth of experience that is still useful.
I don't know about other companies and industries but certainly the message from our leadership is that AI is here, and it's staying, so it's either a case of get on board or look for another job. I'm currently building AI augmented tools to stay relevant and hopefully survive the next round of job cuts.
I’m glad you started your long comment the way that you did, because It made it so easy to discount.
I find AI-assisted development to be quite enjoyable. I’ve logged many, many years of full-time development prior to LLMs hitting the scene. By every indication i’ve been given, I am very good at my job. I do not do this job for the money. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near SV, both physically or spiritually.
I am not a rare exception or anything. My whole team is like this. I work with many people that’re like this. There is no shortage of voices speaking to this online. You’re in denial.
Drop this “you probably just don’t love the craft if you aren’t on my side” BS. it was old six months ago. It’s inexcusably ignorant now. If your view had such merit you wouldn’t need to be this intellectually dishonest. Accept that different people are different.
Why do you feel that way? I'm a SWE and LLMs have 10x me as a developer
Are you earning 10x too? You are just cheaper to your employer… and you seem proud of that. But naive
What if one’s entire existence doesn’t revolve around the role they play in capitalist systems? Comments like this make it blindingly apparent that this is just a VC’s web forum.
> What if one’s entire existence doesn’t revolve around the role they play in capitalist systems.
Quit playing for a little bit. Quit working. See how quickly people deride of devalue you. If I don’t work, I don’t eat, I don’t get a place to sleep, etc. and “the role I play in the capitalist system” determines exactly how much of those things I can have.
I find it similar to “it’s not useful to compare yourself to others” adage. In society, you’re constantly evaluated or compared against others: when trying to find work, when trying to find a home, etc.
Sure maybe you can fuck off and try and live like Diogenes, but you’ll more likely to just collect a string of arrests or unwanted conflict with junkies.
You are entirely defined by your role in the capitalist system because you cannot exist outside of it.
yeah, but it also made us slaves of LLMs, let's be real, we will not do anything else than query AIs soon enough.
Take this vague, emotive, thought-terminating language to your journal or a pub rant or something. What does this even mean? Only one entity in this interaction has free will and it’s not the LLM. “Humanity reliant on another technology” is hardly news. You’re probably just getting a taste of your own medicine. Most people here have spent their careers at least ATTEMPTING to disrupt industries/areas of society in a way that makes people increasingly reliant on “technology”.