I'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.
> 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.
This is exactly how I feel, and I have been trying to think how to articulate it.
I love programming, and have loved it ever since I read the first page of my BASIC programming book 35 years ago and learned how to write a PRINT statement. I remember running into my parent's room as an 8 year old, telling them I knew how to make the computer print something. It was so exciting.
I have never lost that excitement, but my love is not just about programming. It is about technology in general. I love the idea of having smart machines, and being able to use them to do stuff, and the power you can have when you automate something. I love being able to come up with an idea about how a machine can do what I want, and then how that means it can do it over and over without tiring.
I loved technology in science fiction. My family watched Star Trek: The Next Generation from the first episode until the last. I loved Data, I loved the ships computer, I loved the holodeck. I dreamed about having those. I was so excited when I spent way too much money to buy the very first Oculus Rift dev kit, because it felt so much closer to the holodeck than anything I had experienced before.
I have felt that way about AI. I was astonished by the first ChatGPT I used. It was amazing! The first programming AI I tried was github's copilot, and I was already astonished. It was able to complete the function I needed! How did it know what I wanted to do?
I continue to be amazed at every advancement. I remember the first time I tried Claude, and I had it write me a connect 4 engine in Rust (writing connect 4 engines is one of my standard 'new language' routines), and it did it!
I have felt closer to living in Star Trek these last couple of years than ever before. Telling the computer what you want, seeing the response, and refining what you are asking for is how I dreamed of using a computer since I saw them do that on the Enterprise. And here I am, doing it!
I like computers and programming because I like technology, and I like seeing it advance into areas that seemed impossible before. I love the fact that the 'Tasks' XKCD that I loved to quote for so many years when non-programmers would talk about a programming idea (https://xkcd.com/1425/) has become completely obsolete; now anyone could spin up a bird identifying app in a few hours. What was 'virtually impossible' is now routine.
THAT is the thing I love, not writing code. I mean, I DO love writing code, but I love getting my machines to do what I want even more.
I can't wait until robotics become more mainstream. I can't wait to have a machine that can clean my bathrooms and do my laundry and cooke me dinner. I can already imagine the routines I will develop, and the new ways of combining those skills I will come up with when these things are invented. Or hell, maybe I will join one of the companies working on those things and move that field forward.
There is no end to what technology can do, and I am so excited to see what is next.
The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing.
Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding whilst at the same it providing value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful.
For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted.
As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it.
The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time.
The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops.
The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.
Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.
Yeah, some people are is saying "Oh coding is solved, but we still need people to guide the architecture."
But coding was "solved" by self-play against "small" problems. Is there any reason training couldn't be scaled up to even longer horizon tasks like evolving an architecture in a growing business? The increasing load from a growing business, both in terms of usage and product accretion, can be entirely simulated in a data-center, and therefore trained against.
There is a sort of conceit here that tech is everything. There doesn't need to be "no jobs", it could just (or mostly) be the tech sector that is impacted and jobs are displaced. In the history of concentrated sector losses, the US public hasn't been kind to those displaced. The world marches on, no matter how important we think we are.
> I'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.
Two important things you didn't address:
1. Quality-of-life
2. Economic security
I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic security (in a way that increases inequality) and make my work simultaneously more intense and less satisfying. I may be in a better position than a new-grad comp sci major, but the effects are a net negative. That doesn't make me happy or excited. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'm also unhappy for the new-grad comp sci majors, too.
I think one thing you can say for sure, is AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way, despite any propaganda to the contrary. It's deeply anti-human, and serves other inhuman mechanisms first and foremost. A relatively small number of people are building it to just see what happens and maybe win the lottery in the process, and everyone else has to deal with the consequences of that (which, by the way, is why data centers are so hated: it's not the first we've been through something like this and almost everyone is sick of it).
> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way
What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it.
AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that.
Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.
Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used. Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.
> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?
No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily replaceable ways (which my intuition says are the numerical bulk of users), many people use it because they're required to, and a relatively small fraction use it to build things or replace human labor in their employ, etc.
But to restate my point: AI systems like ChatGPT weren't built to solve any kind of problem most people actually have. Few people, if anyone, had a ChatGPT-shaped hole in their life in 2021. It was built because it could be built, and it continue to be built because some other people have a "problem" that they have to pay a lot of money to workers and they hope to do less of that in the future. And causing societal harm or damage doesn't seem to any kind of deterrent to many of them, if they think about it at all.
Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now.
I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be.
Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans.
Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers.
Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery.
> I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
That line sounds good, but it's not hard to understand how that could ultimately be a net-negative for most people.
We don't live in a communist society, where everyone is secure and running around solving problems for their own satisfaction and self-actualization. A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."
What that could mean in practice is the "everyone else" is actually some smallish elite that finds it can get away with sharing even less if its riches with others.
If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure. Not some piddling 5% bribe, but 100% (or a super-majority stake, at the minimum). I'm sure there can be quite a bit of innovation in the area of communal ownership.
> A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."
If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.
I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve, and that AI tools will widen the spectrum of what's possible to solve in a way that provides a whole lot of economic opportunity. I hope I'm not wrong!
> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
Then Gemini Pro 1.5 happened, and Claude 3, and then Mistral and DeepSeek and Qwen and MiniMax and GLM and more, and now I don't think we need to worry about that at all.
And then Qwen 3.8 27B demonstrated that you can have a useful, agent-driving, competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM.
Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
> If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.
IMHO, UBI is a sop to mitigate the thread of violence and revolution during creation of a poor, disempowered underclass. That's why I'm in favor of literal communal ownership (or some other kind of severe ownership or operation restriction that limits the concentration of power).
> I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve...
Oh "people" will, the question is which people and how many.
I could totally imagine AI leads to a post-scarcity future of abundance for all humanity...which consists of the descendants of the nepo babies of today's billionaires, after everyone else is eased out of existence in some kind of economic holocaust. You can adjust the dial as you see fit to make the survivor group a bit bigger, but the point is the utopia comes only for the few.
>> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
> This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
> ...
> Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
I should probably just have said "AI" instead of "frontier models and data center infrastructure." Because fat lot of good a "competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM" does me if there's no jobs or the jobs available pay shit or suck, because the wealthy just get the work done with their own local models.
> 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
It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread.
It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.
Maybe the real threat is that our industry has been stalled for years, or to put it more politely, that it has been mature for a while. Back before 2010 or so, people actually read books like The Art of Computer Programming, the Dragon Book on compilers, and the Lions’ Book on Unix, or followed sites like lambda-the-ultimate.org. Then sites like High Scalability became popular. Not that everyone studied them cover to cover, but plenty of engineers considered them essential reading. Yet long before LLMs came along, that kind of depth had clearly become niche. The creator of High Scalability even put the site up for sale. Whenever someone posts an article titled "Top X Data Structures for Y," every single structure mentioned was invented decades ago. If most of what we do now is just slice and dice abstractions created and refined by previous generations, we are really just relying on our once-unique ability to transfer knowledge - something AI is rapidly replacing.
This isn't unique to software engineering. In Renaissance Italy, mathematicians like Tartaglia and Fior hoarded cubic formula shortcuts like proprietary algorithms and challenged rivals to public math duels. Today, we solve cubic equations without a second thought. Special functions used to be a staple college course for physics and engineering majors. Are they still? The US military used to employ thousands of people just to calculate PDEs by hand. Do we need anyone doing that today?
Our only hope is that our society moves fast enough to create new demands and problem domains that genuinely require new systems and algorithms. Look at AI: it’s evolving rapidly, driving massive demand, and forcing the development of new systems and architectures. As a result, the lucky few[1] working at that frontier are having rewarding careers. Without frontiers like that, the rest of us risk becoming irrelevant.
[1] One unfortunate factor is that building AI now requires lots of capital for accessing GPUs, which means individuals in the open source community have a hard time working on it.
Someone was probably sad when they saw a compiler work for the first time after years of writing assembly. AI is intellectually different, progressing, and has no visible horizon, but in my life technology never did in computing. The point is that technology changes often. I think having a couple of decades in tech makes the shock easier to absorb in many ways. And also harder regarding something so familiar becoming so rapidly irrelevant.
But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.
This is where I'm at mentally... but also it was quite nice for an army of us to get paid six figure salaries to chug along creating React components and sitting in 3 hour retrospectives ;) The ladder has certainly been raised.
There's a larger existential crisis still in store for you. Our global civilization is collapsing. We are choking to death on the unchecked negative externalities of our own progress. It is our species' Achilles heel. Whether or not an individual developer adapts to this temporary capability blip (agentic coding) will not matter in the long run. The systems necessary for supporting these capabilities are too brittle to survive the century.
Where did you get that from? This must be relying on picking very specific parts of the Arctic. This year has not been unusual for the Arctic, in fact, it was colder than the normally cited average (1958-2002). Take a look, see for yourself:
It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!)
Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back.
Not the parent, but pointing out a couple of problems in your analysis:
First, arctic temperatures: this is a widely misunderstood point. Notice that in the graph, the non-summer months are noticeably warmer. The summer months are going to be effectively capped at around 0 degrees until all the ice is gone, so holding up this graph and saying "look, the temperature never got above freezing!" is misleading, because the "warming" is actually happening as a function of melting ice, not air temperature.
Sea ice extent: the last 18 years were the lowest 18 minimums on record. Also, ice extent != ice volume. March 2026 recorded a record-low ice volume. An extent chart reads the same regardless of whether the underlying ice is thin or thick.
Greenland mass balance: here you're just plain wrong. You linked to the surface mass balance page, in other words, snowfall minus surface melt + runoff. This does not account for glacial calving and basal melt. The page you linked says this directly. Total mass balance is a grimmer picture: an average loss of about 252 km³ of water per year over 2003-2025, contributing 0.69 mm/yr to sea level rise.
This is why we're so screwed. People can't even read graphs. They'll stand outside in smoke-filled scorching summer heat and say "but Joe Rogan says the earth is in a cooling cycle".
It's quite misleading to take a two week period and describe it as "last winter". No wonder people give blank looks, it was a transient spike that means nothing. The idea everyone should feel sad is based on arguments about long term averages.
But they were almost exactly average in February. You're reading far too much into noise. The idea of a climate crisis is built on arguments about trends that span hundreds of years, not two weeks.
I think there's some sort of communication gap here. My point is that neither fact tells you anything much, especially not about "how screwed" we are. It's not a battle of data points.
Definitely a comms gap. I'm not going to sit and list all the evidence for the climate crisis we're currently experiencing in an offhand HN comment. I'm going to say something like "this winter we saw crazy high anomalies" to express how screwed we are.
I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of those who are writing code daily.
But it was ever thus. The knowledge of writing assembly language has largely been lost. The vast majority of working programmers today could not write a whole program in assembly, without looking up nearly everything.
In the early years, when compilers were quite bad, it was common for people to write whole programs in assembly even when they could have written C because their output was higher quality. And there were in fact die-hards who just refused to use a compiler in principle, even long after that became irrational. Rollercoaster Tycoon was totally written in assembly, not a single line of C or C++ anywhere. In the mid 90s!
But now only a small number of people need to know it and learn it. For everyone else we let the "artificial intelligence" of the compiler work it out. And whereas it was once worse than humans at writing assembly, these days it's usually better.
> Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool?
The rate at which I'm learning has gone up. I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work.
I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrating to work that way now. As a result I'm out of practice at it.
I expect if someone waved a magic wand and eliminated all forms of LLM and coding agents from the world I would have a couple of less productive months spinning back up on my hand-crafted coding skills again.
What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through, and it was frankly amazing that we lasted this long without getting hit with it.
The consequences aren't great, no. However it was always inevitable because of the way our economy runs.
So the finger should not be pointed at AI, but instead the forces that will harness it in certain ways. That might be impossible to tackle at an individual level, and might feel futile... but so is blaming AI.
I am wondering how this will effect other industries more. We are pretty flexible as software engineers because our skillset needs to constantly evolve. For a lawyer or radiologist or anyone who has been able to do the same thing every day for 20 years? What kind of reaction will they have when they see the ground shifting beneath them.
Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous.
Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.
> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill
My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)
Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless.
Now imagine someone with no existing web knowledge trying to get Claude to build them a Progressive Web App with offline capabilities that uses SQLite compiled to WASM. Moon language.
The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability.
There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.
> given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance.
My comment here is meant to be the opposite of defeatist propaganda! I'm arguing that those of us with skills and experience are becoming more, not less valuable.
It is strange then that those with skills and experience apparently refrain from building websites, since all AI websites are worse than any non-SEO website before 2023.
There isn't a single one that is good, and one that was built by a web framework developer whom I shall not name uses 100% CPU for a static website.
The point of this is that AI is unnecessary and makes products worse even with experienced people operating the AI.
I 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.
This 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.
Exactly. 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.
how did his AI solve the bug? I've had cc recognize a bug was in an outdated lib and then update it to resolve the issue. Granted it made that determination by finding the source code to the lib, identifying the bug, and then verifying it was fixed by looking at the source of the updated lib.
AI 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.
The 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.
Well yeah it conditions you to turn towards it anytime you hit a roadblock.
It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy.
I still write things by hand sometimes because it is fun, but it does make you feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.
My 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.
IDK 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
That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out.
I agree. I open Steam sometimes and I'm met with a conveyor of games that look good enough for me to buy, but I can play a few of them at most before all of them are replaced with a new batch next month.
Fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of those games in that deluge are legitimately quite good but no one will play them because 99% of gamers aren't looking for more games to play.
Just the ones they hear about by worth of mouth, or recurring entries in their favorite series, or from their favorite developers are already too much to keep up with. I'm certainly in that boat. My backlog only grows, and I have quite a bit of free time relative to some people.
I've been a long-time indie gamer and the appeal of older games has increased significantly for me since AI. Nearly an endless supply of top-notch human-crafted classic video games exist, virtually all for free or very cheap. I understand not everyone has the same taste as me but if they did I'd be surprised of there still was a modern gaming industry at all.
You 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.
I 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.
Maybe there’s a narrow window to make hay right now, but that has to be closing fast for the same reasons.
I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.
Ehhhhhh. Its a golden era for one-man indie games that are successful.
But this is deceptive. Per game delivered one man games were likely far far more successful in the past. Simply because there were very few of them in a much smaller market.
There are countless indie games to day and only the best of the best really get any views. It is insanely hard to stand out in that market.
The games industry is terrible. But he's still a kid and can learn making games for the sake of making games. I suggest to look at https://ludumdare.com/ and other game jams. That's a good way to get experience and have fun in the process.
I was the same at that age (decades ago, but still). And I'm kind of glad I didn't go down that path, seeing friends and colleagues who did. There's a (I think) Folding Ideas video where he's talking to some 13-yo Roblox developer who already has that jaded veteran kind of vibe to them. Which might be the most salient visual. The thing is separating the consuming experience from the creating experience, but also recognizing the validity and importance of both. It's obvious but hard to really internalize.
A good parallel I've discovered as an adult is wine. I love it, and collect it, and can talk at length about terroir, techniques, etc. About ten years ago I wanted to get hands-on experience, and thru a friend was able to intern at a local winery during harvest.
That was one of the most intense months of my life, and I was in physical pain for months afterwards, even as a relatively fit person. So much of that elegant, philosophical final product is manual labor, lifting lots of heavy shit, and endless repetitive motion. It was fun, but it was also brutal.
It left me with even more respect for the people who dedicate their lives to it. But also the realization that I'm much more comfortable being on the other end of it. And that's not only ok but absolutely essential, because the producers need people to buy (and maybe wax philosophical) about their product.
So yeah, by all means give it a shot. But also I think it's important to communicate that there are many valid and satisfying ways to engage with something. Consumer/maker isn't a binary.
As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this:
When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treated very poorly. Because you really want to be there. And so they can get away with it. Paid less, treated less, considered less.
It's the same dynamic at play with teachers, who also feel passionate about their work. Probably every profitable field that has passion.
I don't say this to dissuade your son. But he should know what he's getting himself into. What the real price is. And what we need to fix.
What was it like to work in the film industry, presumably as a software developer? I've heard lots of anecdotes about the games industry, but nothing whatsoever about working on a film.
Honestly - and maybe it's because it's had longer to mature - the film industry is better than the game industry. Before computers, films already needed artists to create brilliant stuff - and programming for passion is very much like art, I think.
Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.
That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.
I think you're doing right by giving him AI. But get him a coding harness - that's where the real traction is right now. Claude Code or Codex.
I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.
Don't sweat it. Everyone wants to write games at that age. I wanted to write games at 13, I was taking part in an open source game project at 15. Kid's interests in what kind of things they want to make do widen over time.
The real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I managed to transform that into a broader passion for high-performance low-level programming not necessarily in games, and that has ended up being a great career. There isn't a great mass of people trying to get into the non-game side of this, so I get the benefit of personal passion without the downsides that come from competing with a million other passionate people.
If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
To be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid.
But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places.
This is what I keep saying to my youngest, who wants to do games. Go to any bank or insurance company or web agency or to a FAANG company etc and you find rooms full of people who got into programming because they wanted to write games. And then realized what a trap that is and how much more money they could get out of just doing the same programming work but for far more "boring" ends.
Same as working for a non-profit on "meaningful" work. The meaning part starts to wear thin as you see the people around you slaying themselves for it and getting no adequate compensation.
Only studios that have had a big mouth about using AI are the big ones. Indie studios are eating the industry and most of them are not bullish on AI for replacing the craft, but for optimizing and automating the mundane.
My son is 12, he doesn't care, I've told him how LLMs work, he's used claude, he's not convinced that AI changes things that much and frankly, so am I.
The work was always to build, thoughtfully, carefully, with vision, and ingenuity. That hasn't gone away.
You are looking at this all wrong. Give him the tools now and watch him be a better game dev today than a professional engineer from 4 years ago. He can work on his dreams as of this exact moment.
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.
The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.
I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.
Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I don't think it was ever ignored that knowledge workers would be the first affected by AI. I remember hearing for a long time that lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. would all be obsoleted by AI.
I do think many (including me) were surprised that software engineering would be the first kind of knowledge work to be successfully automated. We assumed it would be one of the last, because we'd be the industry using AI to replace everyone else, not the industry using AI to replace ourselves.
That's called "elite overproduction". Too many people going to college when the jobs aren't there. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.
It's much worse in less developed countries. The article today about essays in Kenya mentions that the country is creating far more educated people than it can use. Egypt had a scheme where the government guaranteed a government job to everyone who graduated from college. They had to give that up when the oil ran out.
It's hitting top people first, which was unexpected. Mathematicians who've won the Fields Medal are worried, and some are giving up math.[1]
I was in denial for a long time too. Now I see it everywhere, among very smart people, too.
They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.
On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.
I felt this way too. But I think it's because we've lived through so many hype cycles (3D printing, IoT, crypto, etc.) which have either been modest improvements or busts.
However, game changing technology DOES come along from time to time. I think AI falls into that category, perhaps more than any other.
> but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I have mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand: long-lived disparity like this is going to be very painful for those on the losing end of it. On the other hand: slowing the pace of change allows society and government to better adapt to it, and really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
> really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.
If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.
Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.
> the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be
Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is being stripped from us.
Even if we aren't impoverished in the future due to some UBI scheme or whatever, it's hard to imagine what that looks like other than "disenfranchised". How do you have any kind of clout inside a system that you are fully dependent on?
Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.
I don't have any trust that the people left standing will ever be motivated enough to figure out a solution that doesn't involve letting the rest of us starve or actively having us killed
What people don't understand is that dictators don't kill everyone because they're just monsters.
Well, they are monsters, but the reason they do it is because it's kill or be killed for them. You have to eliminate threats before they eliminate you.
And believe me, LOTS of people will want to depose a world dictator.
Given the rate of progress in robotics, if AI works then there won't be anyone left standing to worry about.
That's the whole point of doing it fast, otherwise yes they will attempt to slow things down so they can take advantage of the intermediate state where some are still standing, temporarily, to get rid of the others. And that is very much what a lot of the current pausing noise is in aid of.
Assuming 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.
LLM's are perfectly capable of replacing tons of jobs in fields like marketing, corporate communications, journalism etc. Also, as price of software is driven down thanks to LLM's, more custom software can be built to automate all kinds of tasks in many fields, tasks that were not previously economically viable to automate. You are delusional if you think SWE's will be fkd and all other white collar professions will be fine.
The way I see it, few professions will be completely replaced, but people using LLM's as their tools will do more work, reducing the need for labour. Humans in many, many fields will focus more on quality assurance, less on the daily tasks they used to do.
I'm not being a doomer. But knowledge workers are going to be replaced en masse. Maybe you can't see it because you don't have to watch the computer do more of your job every year, but it's here.
If you feel gleeful because it won't effect you, don't worry, it will.
Let me go ask my brother who works at pwc as a partner - who has yet to lay off a single person in the entire firm since the llm-hype+boom. They’re also hiring more than ever.
You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious.
>You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious.
Please do not lump all HN posters in one category, and if you insist on doing so, please be courteous and generous with your interpretation of their words.
As an aside, I had to look up what pwc is because they're totally irrelevant to me. But in general, it costs you nothing to tell people to spend years retraining their hard-earned skills, which is roughly what your advice is worth. You can't promise that the industry they pivot into will exist by the time they qualify to work in it, and the cost of their career retraining is denominated in time they don't get back. Nor will you be there for their journey to even know if they made it.
Funny how it works. To me you are delusional and living in a bubble. Your stance would’ve made (some, not much though) year ago, but today it’s just dumb.
Or generating spreadsheets, or sitting in meetings, or operating any other kind of software.
That can all be replaced with AI. Carpenters, flight attendants, etc. won't yet, because robotics just isn't there yet. You need humans to move things in irregular ways. But everyone else can be replaced.
I 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.
I 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”.
This 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.
ambition: the feeling of innate dissatisfaction that motivates one into fixing a problem that doesn't exist.
you ambitious people have destroyed the world and humanity. if you had an ounce of self awareness you would hide your face in shame.
Those who decided its not enough to survive from hunting and gathering are demons. Farmers are rotten and their putrid large brains know nothing but more. Same mentality behind paraphelia btw. Those who are never satisfied build a hell out of their yearning. Simple minded folk deserve better than you demons. I only feel bad for them, everyone else, enjoy your suffering, you have recieved exactly what you deserve.
For 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.
This 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.
Relatable. 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.
Came 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.
Kudos 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.
It’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.
Unless you were literally the best engineer on the planet, it was always the case that someone could do what you do better and faster. Now, we're either at or approaching a world where even the best engineer on the planet has the same reaction as you. The playing field has been reset. The question for your future is which of you can make better use of the genius engineer in your pocket. Perhaps that involves a different set of tasks than you imagined yourself doing, but fundamentally, all good knowledge work is just creative problem solving. If you were good at that at one level of abstraction, I would bet you will be good at it at another.
I 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.
Super 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.
There 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Kudos 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Funny 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.
The author does say it's a potential threat to his career and income so clearly he would have something to worry about even if his identity was built on something else.
I agree with you though, the foundation of your identity shouldn't be your career. It's a very fragile thing in today's world.
This 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)
Good 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Llm 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
The 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.
I 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.
One 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.
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.
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.
I 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.
so 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.
I 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.
If 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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).
I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI.
Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards.
The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such.
Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.
It'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.
AI 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.
This 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Using 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.
> 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
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Deletionists 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.
I'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)
stop 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...
on 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
>> 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.
> 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.
I 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 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.
It 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.
This 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.
Excellent 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.
> 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.
> 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
This 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)
I 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.
Overpaid 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.
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.
Marx 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.
They’re not selling their own slice of labor though. They’re effectively employees that have to pay a bunch of costs that would be covered by their employer if they were classified correctly.
This 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.
> I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it
Please don't do that.
Someone emailed us a link to your comment and was concerned that you were in this level of distress. I didn't have another way of getting in touch with you, so I thought I'd post here and say that there are strangers on HN who care. Perhaps they (or we, rather - I'll include myself too) can't do much beyond that, but I hope it makes at least a small difference.
It’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.
As 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.
I 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
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.
I have to admit, as a former JW, the linked article is actually not proselytizing, instead it's actually got worthwhile advice.
We are each here for a reason and we all touch many lives. We may not ever know, while we're on this earth, many of the important roles we play, just by being ourselves.
I'll add. I once got stopped by a bunch of JW. And I wanted to practice my Dutch, and they were willing to talk to me in Dutch.
They showed me a video about depression. And it was actually exceptionally good advice. It spoke about speaking to a therapist. There was a small bit about prayer, which was obviously not my bag. But I was pleasantly surprised at how grounded the advice was.
Hopefully their advice includes: "take this advice, and then don't join the Jehovah's Witnesses. It's a high control abusive religion that will make your depression worse".
I often feel like this as well. It's hard to talk about it with people, because they panic and immediately start sending you literature about suicidality and giving you hotlines, etc, etc, as if I haven't already seen all of that before.
I'm not actively suicidal or anything (and I know all the signs of risk, and what to do about it), but there's an underlying feeling that life just hurts and has no meaning. Currently the thing that helps me stick around is the idea of "doing it for the plot". Life ends in short order either way, so I figure I'll just stick around and keep it interesting.
Strangely, 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.
I'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.
> 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.
Completely agree. There was never a lack of things for me to do, just time. I can explore so many ideas that I simply couldn't before.
What's your job or source of income? This is the main factor behind how you feel about AI.
> 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?
There's a mythological story about the hubris of flying; I'm sure Claude can pull it up for you.
HA! Yes, too true.
I already did, before AI:
This is exactly how I feel, and I have been trying to think how to articulate it.
I love programming, and have loved it ever since I read the first page of my BASIC programming book 35 years ago and learned how to write a PRINT statement. I remember running into my parent's room as an 8 year old, telling them I knew how to make the computer print something. It was so exciting.
I have never lost that excitement, but my love is not just about programming. It is about technology in general. I love the idea of having smart machines, and being able to use them to do stuff, and the power you can have when you automate something. I love being able to come up with an idea about how a machine can do what I want, and then how that means it can do it over and over without tiring.
I loved technology in science fiction. My family watched Star Trek: The Next Generation from the first episode until the last. I loved Data, I loved the ships computer, I loved the holodeck. I dreamed about having those. I was so excited when I spent way too much money to buy the very first Oculus Rift dev kit, because it felt so much closer to the holodeck than anything I had experienced before.
I have felt that way about AI. I was astonished by the first ChatGPT I used. It was amazing! The first programming AI I tried was github's copilot, and I was already astonished. It was able to complete the function I needed! How did it know what I wanted to do?
I continue to be amazed at every advancement. I remember the first time I tried Claude, and I had it write me a connect 4 engine in Rust (writing connect 4 engines is one of my standard 'new language' routines), and it did it!
I have felt closer to living in Star Trek these last couple of years than ever before. Telling the computer what you want, seeing the response, and refining what you are asking for is how I dreamed of using a computer since I saw them do that on the Enterprise. And here I am, doing it!
I like computers and programming because I like technology, and I like seeing it advance into areas that seemed impossible before. I love the fact that the 'Tasks' XKCD that I loved to quote for so many years when non-programmers would talk about a programming idea (https://xkcd.com/1425/) has become completely obsolete; now anyone could spin up a bird identifying app in a few hours. What was 'virtually impossible' is now routine.
THAT is the thing I love, not writing code. I mean, I DO love writing code, but I love getting my machines to do what I want even more.
I can't wait until robotics become more mainstream. I can't wait to have a machine that can clean my bathrooms and do my laundry and cooke me dinner. I can already imagine the routines I will develop, and the new ways of combining those skills I will come up with when these things are invented. Or hell, maybe I will join one of the companies working on those things and move that field forward.
There is no end to what technology can do, and I am so excited to see what is next.
The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding whilst at the same it providing value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful.
For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted.
As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this
I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it.
That particular reference isn't fair though. You need to view that comment in context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944
The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time.
Just today, Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) tweeted that "Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human": https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577
I'm entirely in agreement with that. The interesting challenge is how we achieve that new high bar.
The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops.
The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.
Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.
Yeah, some people are is saying "Oh coding is solved, but we still need people to guide the architecture."
But coding was "solved" by self-play against "small" problems. Is there any reason training couldn't be scaled up to even longer horizon tasks like evolving an architecture in a growing business? The increasing load from a growing business, both in terms of usage and product accretion, can be entirely simulated in a data-center, and therefore trained against.
If there is no jobs, there is no modern economy in today's sense and "money" costs nothing.
That will trigger very interesting consequences.
There is a sort of conceit here that tech is everything. There doesn't need to be "no jobs", it could just (or mostly) be the tech sector that is impacted and jobs are displaced. In the history of concentrated sector losses, the US public hasn't been kind to those displaced. The world marches on, no matter how important we think we are.
Why would no jobs mean no money?
Simon, you stole from me a fulfilling career of hand crafting pelican svgs.
> I'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.
Two important things you didn't address:
1. Quality-of-life
2. Economic security
I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic security (in a way that increases inequality) and make my work simultaneously more intense and less satisfying. I may be in a better position than a new-grad comp sci major, but the effects are a net negative. That doesn't make me happy or excited. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'm also unhappy for the new-grad comp sci majors, too.
I think one thing you can say for sure, is AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way, despite any propaganda to the contrary. It's deeply anti-human, and serves other inhuman mechanisms first and foremost. A relatively small number of people are building it to just see what happens and maybe win the lottery in the process, and everyone else has to deal with the consequences of that (which, by the way, is why data centers are so hated: it's not the first we've been through something like this and almost everyone is sick of it).
> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way
What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
>What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity?
Washing machine, fridge, indoor plumbing, penicillin
What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it.
AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that.
Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.
> What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have.
How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
> How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used. Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.
You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?
I think it's being built to solve problems they have. OpenAI shut down GPT-4o because it leaned too hard into getting people addicted to it.
> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?
No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily replaceable ways (which my intuition says are the numerical bulk of users), many people use it because they're required to, and a relatively small fraction use it to build things or replace human labor in their employ, etc.
But to restate my point: AI systems like ChatGPT weren't built to solve any kind of problem most people actually have. Few people, if anyone, had a ChatGPT-shaped hole in their life in 2021. It was built because it could be built, and it continue to be built because some other people have a "problem" that they have to pay a lot of money to workers and they hope to do less of that in the future. And causing societal harm or damage doesn't seem to any kind of deterrent to many of them, if they think about it at all.
Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now.
I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be.
Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans.
Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers.
Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery.
> I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
That line sounds good, but it's not hard to understand how that could ultimately be a net-negative for most people.
We don't live in a communist society, where everyone is secure and running around solving problems for their own satisfaction and self-actualization. A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."
What that could mean in practice is the "everyone else" is actually some smallish elite that finds it can get away with sharing even less if its riches with others.
If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure. Not some piddling 5% bribe, but 100% (or a super-majority stake, at the minimum). I'm sure there can be quite a bit of innovation in the area of communal ownership.
> A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."
If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.
I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve, and that AI tools will widen the spectrum of what's possible to solve in a way that provides a whole lot of economic opportunity. I hope I'm not wrong!
> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
Then Gemini Pro 1.5 happened, and Claude 3, and then Mistral and DeepSeek and Qwen and MiniMax and GLM and more, and now I don't think we need to worry about that at all.
And then Qwen 3.8 27B demonstrated that you can have a useful, agent-driving, competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM.
Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
> If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.
IMHO, UBI is a sop to mitigate the thread of violence and revolution during creation of a poor, disempowered underclass. That's why I'm in favor of literal communal ownership (or some other kind of severe ownership or operation restriction that limits the concentration of power).
> I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve...
Oh "people" will, the question is which people and how many.
I could totally imagine AI leads to a post-scarcity future of abundance for all humanity...which consists of the descendants of the nepo babies of today's billionaires, after everyone else is eased out of existence in some kind of economic holocaust. You can adjust the dial as you see fit to make the survivor group a bit bigger, but the point is the utopia comes only for the few.
>> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
> This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
> ...
> Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
I should probably just have said "AI" instead of "frontier models and data center infrastructure." Because fat lot of good a "competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM" does me if there's no jobs or the jobs available pay shit or suck, because the wealthy just get the work done with their own local models.
> 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
It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread.
It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.
Maybe the real threat is that our industry has been stalled for years, or to put it more politely, that it has been mature for a while. Back before 2010 or so, people actually read books like The Art of Computer Programming, the Dragon Book on compilers, and the Lions’ Book on Unix, or followed sites like lambda-the-ultimate.org. Then sites like High Scalability became popular. Not that everyone studied them cover to cover, but plenty of engineers considered them essential reading. Yet long before LLMs came along, that kind of depth had clearly become niche. The creator of High Scalability even put the site up for sale. Whenever someone posts an article titled "Top X Data Structures for Y," every single structure mentioned was invented decades ago. If most of what we do now is just slice and dice abstractions created and refined by previous generations, we are really just relying on our once-unique ability to transfer knowledge - something AI is rapidly replacing.
This isn't unique to software engineering. In Renaissance Italy, mathematicians like Tartaglia and Fior hoarded cubic formula shortcuts like proprietary algorithms and challenged rivals to public math duels. Today, we solve cubic equations without a second thought. Special functions used to be a staple college course for physics and engineering majors. Are they still? The US military used to employ thousands of people just to calculate PDEs by hand. Do we need anyone doing that today?
Our only hope is that our society moves fast enough to create new demands and problem domains that genuinely require new systems and algorithms. Look at AI: it’s evolving rapidly, driving massive demand, and forcing the development of new systems and architectures. As a result, the lucky few[1] working at that frontier are having rewarding careers. Without frontiers like that, the rest of us risk becoming irrelevant.
[1] One unfortunate factor is that building AI now requires lots of capital for accessing GPUs, which means individuals in the open source community have a hard time working on it.
Someone was probably sad when they saw a compiler work for the first time after years of writing assembly. AI is intellectually different, progressing, and has no visible horizon, but in my life technology never did in computing. The point is that technology changes often. I think having a couple of decades in tech makes the shock easier to absorb in many ways. And also harder regarding something so familiar becoming so rapidly irrelevant.
But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.
This is where I'm at mentally... but also it was quite nice for an army of us to get paid six figure salaries to chug along creating React components and sitting in 3 hour retrospectives ;) The ladder has certainly been raised.
To me it just fills like a bit more of a demand to be a generalist, or be really good at pairing with other specialists.
I feel the same and have gone through a similar journey.
There's a larger existential crisis still in store for you. Our global civilization is collapsing. We are choking to death on the unchecked negative externalities of our own progress. It is our species' Achilles heel. Whether or not an individual developer adapts to this temporary capability blip (agentic coding) will not matter in the long run. The systems necessary for supporting these capabilities are too brittle to survive the century.
I keep mentioning to people that last winter parts of the arctic were 10C hotter than the average for the last 100 years and I get blank looks.
Where did you get that from? This must be relying on picking very specific parts of the Arctic. This year has not been unusual for the Arctic, in fact, it was colder than the normally cited average (1958-2002). Take a look, see for yourself:
https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!)
Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back.
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...
Greenland mass balance was entirely average and is currently at the top end of the known observations, it seems:
https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
Not the parent, but pointing out a couple of problems in your analysis:
First, arctic temperatures: this is a widely misunderstood point. Notice that in the graph, the non-summer months are noticeably warmer. The summer months are going to be effectively capped at around 0 degrees until all the ice is gone, so holding up this graph and saying "look, the temperature never got above freezing!" is misleading, because the "warming" is actually happening as a function of melting ice, not air temperature.
Sea ice extent: the last 18 years were the lowest 18 minimums on record. Also, ice extent != ice volume. March 2026 recorded a record-low ice volume. An extent chart reads the same regardless of whether the underlying ice is thin or thick.
Greenland mass balance: here you're just plain wrong. You linked to the surface mass balance page, in other words, snowfall minus surface melt + runoff. This does not account for glacial calving and basal melt. The page you linked says this directly. Total mass balance is a grimmer picture: an average loss of about 252 km³ of water per year over 2003-2025, contributing 0.69 mm/yr to sea level rise.
This is why we're so screwed. People can't even read graphs. They'll stand outside in smoke-filled scorching summer heat and say "but Joe Rogan says the earth is in a cooling cycle".
"My dosimeter only reads 3.6 roentgen / hour!"
How is this for a long term trend? Using your own sources: https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n_anomaly.php
Go to your first link, click on 2025 and look at the winter values (Nov/Dec).
OK, I see where you are getting it from now.
It's quite misleading to take a two week period and describe it as "last winter". No wonder people give blank looks, it was a transient spike that means nothing. The idea everyone should feel sad is based on arguments about long term averages.
Also just look at the first months of 2026 in the link you shared - the average temperatures are up to 15C higher in March!
But they were almost exactly average in February. You're reading far too much into noise. The idea of a climate crisis is built on arguments about trends that span hundreds of years, not two weeks.
"They were nearly the same average for exactly one day in February" says the guy lecturing me on reading noise.
I think there's some sort of communication gap here. My point is that neither fact tells you anything much, especially not about "how screwed" we are. It's not a battle of data points.
Definitely a comms gap. I'm not going to sit and list all the evidence for the climate crisis we're currently experiencing in an offhand HN comment. I'm going to say something like "this winter we saw crazy high anomalies" to express how screwed we are.
I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of those who are writing code daily.
But it was ever thus. The knowledge of writing assembly language has largely been lost. The vast majority of working programmers today could not write a whole program in assembly, without looking up nearly everything.
In the early years, when compilers were quite bad, it was common for people to write whole programs in assembly even when they could have written C because their output was higher quality. And there were in fact die-hards who just refused to use a compiler in principle, even long after that became irrational. Rollercoaster Tycoon was totally written in assembly, not a single line of C or C++ anywhere. In the mid 90s!
But now only a small number of people need to know it and learn it. For everyone else we let the "artificial intelligence" of the compiler work it out. And whereas it was once worse than humans at writing assembly, these days it's usually better.
Does anyone care? No. It wasn't important.
> Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool?
The rate at which I'm learning has gone up. I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work.
I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrating to work that way now. As a result I'm out of practice at it.
I expect if someone waved a magic wand and eliminated all forms of LLM and coding agents from the world I would have a couple of less productive months spinning back up on my hand-crafted coding skills again.
What we're really speaking about here is software developers being thrown into the same automation/de-skilling downward escalator that every other trade has suffered through, and it was frankly amazing that we lasted this long without getting hit with it.
The consequences aren't great, no. However it was always inevitable because of the way our economy runs.
So the finger should not be pointed at AI, but instead the forces that will harness it in certain ways. That might be impossible to tackle at an individual level, and might feel futile... but so is blaming AI.
I am wondering how this will effect other industries more. We are pretty flexible as software engineers because our skillset needs to constantly evolve. For a lawyer or radiologist or anyone who has been able to do the same thing every day for 20 years? What kind of reaction will they have when they see the ground shifting beneath them.
They won't.
Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous.
https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole...
Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.
> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill
My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)
> set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left
Definitely true at this exact moment, but very uncertain that AI won't also outrun those other areas faster than even existing experts.
You need expertise to productively use that AI.
Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless.
Now imagine someone with no existing web knowledge trying to get Claude to build them a Progressive Web App with offline capabilities that uses SQLite compiled to WASM. Moon language.
The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability.
There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
This is defeatist propaganda.
The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.
> given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance.
My comment here is meant to be the opposite of defeatist propaganda! I'm arguing that those of us with skills and experience are becoming more, not less valuable.
It is strange then that those with skills and experience apparently refrain from building websites, since all AI websites are worse than any non-SEO website before 2023.
There isn't a single one that is good, and one that was built by a web framework developer whom I shall not name uses 100% CPU for a static website.
The point of this is that AI is unnecessary and makes products worse even with experienced people operating the AI.
I 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.
This 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.
Exactly. 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.
how did his AI solve the bug? I've had cc recognize a bug was in an outdated lib and then update it to resolve the issue. Granted it made that determination by finding the source code to the lib, identifying the bug, and then verifying it was fixed by looking at the source of the updated lib.
AI told him to use an alternative function which was similar but didn't have the same bug.
AI 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.
The 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.
Well yeah it conditions you to turn towards it anytime you hit a roadblock.
It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy.
I still write things by hand sometimes because it is fun, but it does make you feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.
> feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.
or when it handles like 5 edge cases by default that I didn't even think of. That's scary because then I start thinking about all my other code.
My 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.
IDK 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
That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
I agree. I open Steam sometimes and I'm met with a conveyor of games that look good enough for me to buy, but I can play a few of them at most before all of them are replaced with a new batch next month.
There's nothing new under the sun. The quality of your ideas and execution will still matter in this flood, as it always has been.
Fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of those games in that deluge are legitimately quite good but no one will play them because 99% of gamers aren't looking for more games to play.
Just the ones they hear about by worth of mouth, or recurring entries in their favorite series, or from their favorite developers are already too much to keep up with. I'm certainly in that boat. My backlog only grows, and I have quite a bit of free time relative to some people.
I think your ability to market will matter the most (which is also pretty much the same as ever).
I've been a long-time indie gamer and the appeal of older games has increased significantly for me since AI. Nearly an endless supply of top-notch human-crafted classic video games exist, virtually all for free or very cheap. I understand not everyone has the same taste as me but if they did I'd be surprised of there still was a modern gaming industry at all.
Absolutely, I'm a follower of a niche, local sport with a relatively small support base.
It never really made economic sense for a game studio to make video games for it.
Now there are indie developers creating extremely fun and truly impressive games of that sport with the help of AI.
Could you share examples?
You 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.
I 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.
Maybe there’s a narrow window to make hay right now, but that has to be closing fast for the same reasons.
I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.
I hold the opinion that learning about tech is important, especially as more and more of our world revolves around software.
Biased of course, but I'd keep betting on software over other fields when it comes to career options.
Well I’ve certainly been wrong before, and hope I am about this, but it all looks very fuzzy to me right now.
Maybe it's a golden era for making one-man indie games, but not for playing and selling those games.
Ehhhhhh. Its a golden era for one-man indie games that are successful.
But this is deceptive. Per game delivered one man games were likely far far more successful in the past. Simply because there were very few of them in a much smaller market.
There are countless indie games to day and only the best of the best really get any views. It is insanely hard to stand out in that market.
The games industry is terrible. But he's still a kid and can learn making games for the sake of making games. I suggest to look at https://ludumdare.com/ and other game jams. That's a good way to get experience and have fun in the process.
I was the same at that age (decades ago, but still). And I'm kind of glad I didn't go down that path, seeing friends and colleagues who did. There's a (I think) Folding Ideas video where he's talking to some 13-yo Roblox developer who already has that jaded veteran kind of vibe to them. Which might be the most salient visual. The thing is separating the consuming experience from the creating experience, but also recognizing the validity and importance of both. It's obvious but hard to really internalize.
A good parallel I've discovered as an adult is wine. I love it, and collect it, and can talk at length about terroir, techniques, etc. About ten years ago I wanted to get hands-on experience, and thru a friend was able to intern at a local winery during harvest.
That was one of the most intense months of my life, and I was in physical pain for months afterwards, even as a relatively fit person. So much of that elegant, philosophical final product is manual labor, lifting lots of heavy shit, and endless repetitive motion. It was fun, but it was also brutal.
It left me with even more respect for the people who dedicate their lives to it. But also the realization that I'm much more comfortable being on the other end of it. And that's not only ok but absolutely essential, because the producers need people to buy (and maybe wax philosophical) about their product.
So yeah, by all means give it a shot. But also I think it's important to communicate that there are many valid and satisfying ways to engage with something. Consumer/maker isn't a binary.
Best time to be a game programmer was probably the 80s or 90s, when you could make games in your bedroom and they became a hit.
Either then or today, when you can do the same thing and sell them through steam. Today you’ve got more competition but it’s easier to distribute.
If you haven’t already… show him how to use codex or claude or whatever. And let him start having fun and making games.
I got him a ChatGPT account with parental controls on it. I'm just hoping he uses it as a tool and not a crutch.
> I'm just hoping he uses it as a tool and not a crutch.
That's not enough given how much adults are struggling with this.
As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this:
When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treated very poorly. Because you really want to be there. And so they can get away with it. Paid less, treated less, considered less.
It's the same dynamic at play with teachers, who also feel passionate about their work. Probably every profitable field that has passion.
I don't say this to dissuade your son. But he should know what he's getting himself into. What the real price is. And what we need to fix.
What was it like to work in the film industry, presumably as a software developer? I've heard lots of anecdotes about the games industry, but nothing whatsoever about working on a film.
Honestly - and maybe it's because it's had longer to mature - the film industry is better than the game industry. Before computers, films already needed artists to create brilliant stuff - and programming for passion is very much like art, I think.
Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.
That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.
I think you're doing right by giving him AI. But get him a coding harness - that's where the real traction is right now. Claude Code or Codex.
I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.
This is, in fact, what my kid is planning. They are artistically inclined - make beautiful art - but when looking at colleges focused on law.
Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?
Don't sweat it. Everyone wants to write games at that age. I wanted to write games at 13, I was taking part in an open source game project at 15. Kid's interests in what kind of things they want to make do widen over time.
The real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I managed to transform that into a broader passion for high-performance low-level programming not necessarily in games, and that has ended up being a great career. There isn't a great mass of people trying to get into the non-game side of this, so I get the benefit of personal passion without the downsides that come from competing with a million other passionate people.
If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
To be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid.
But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places.
"Follow your bliss" as they say.
Yeah, I'd be a lot less confident in any career advice today compared to, say, ten years ago. But what else can you do....
This is what I keep saying to my youngest, who wants to do games. Go to any bank or insurance company or web agency or to a FAANG company etc and you find rooms full of people who got into programming because they wanted to write games. And then realized what a trap that is and how much more money they could get out of just doing the same programming work but for far more "boring" ends.
Same as working for a non-profit on "meaningful" work. The meaning part starts to wear thin as you see the people around you slaying themselves for it and getting no adequate compensation.
There's a reason garbage collectors get paid so well.
Only studios that have had a big mouth about using AI are the big ones. Indie studios are eating the industry and most of them are not bullish on AI for replacing the craft, but for optimizing and automating the mundane.
My son is 12, he doesn't care, I've told him how LLMs work, he's used claude, he's not convinced that AI changes things that much and frankly, so am I.
The work was always to build, thoughtfully, carefully, with vision, and ingenuity. That hasn't gone away.
Tell him to run now. Time to become a plumber at least for a bit.
You are looking at this all wrong. Give him the tools now and watch him be a better game dev today than a professional engineer from 4 years ago. He can work on his dreams as of this exact moment.
> He's looking at how it used to be done
I mean, you're probably thinking 30 years ago; not any time recent. Indy devs are still a thing though.
I 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.
> I can't believe the AI boosters were right.
Not even sure they can believe it.
The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.
I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.
Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I don't think it was ever ignored that knowledge workers would be the first affected by AI. I remember hearing for a long time that lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. would all be obsoleted by AI.
I do think many (including me) were surprised that software engineering would be the first kind of knowledge work to be successfully automated. We assumed it would be one of the last, because we'd be the industry using AI to replace everyone else, not the industry using AI to replace ourselves.
I've always been interested in making my job easier first and solving business problems second :)
> creating large minorities of disenfranchised.
That's called "elite overproduction". Too many people going to college when the jobs aren't there. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.
It's much worse in less developed countries. The article today about essays in Kenya mentions that the country is creating far more educated people than it can use. Egypt had a scheme where the government guaranteed a government job to everyone who graduated from college. They had to give that up when the oil ran out.
It's hitting top people first, which was unexpected. Mathematicians who've won the Fields Medal are worried, and some are giving up math.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/19/mathema...
I was in denial for a long time too. Now I see it everywhere, among very smart people, too.
They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.
It's been coming "soon" for years now.
On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.
I felt this way too. But I think it's because we've lived through so many hype cycles (3D printing, IoT, crypto, etc.) which have either been modest improvements or busts.
However, game changing technology DOES come along from time to time. I think AI falls into that category, perhaps more than any other.
Honestly, I don't think any of us know exactly what's coming.
The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.
> but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I have mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand: long-lived disparity like this is going to be very painful for those on the losing end of it. On the other hand: slowing the pace of change allows society and government to better adapt to it, and really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
> really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.
If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.
Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.
> the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be
Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is being stripped from us.
Even if we aren't impoverished in the future due to some UBI scheme or whatever, it's hard to imagine what that looks like other than "disenfranchised". How do you have any kind of clout inside a system that you are fully dependent on?
Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.
I don't have any trust that the people left standing will ever be motivated enough to figure out a solution that doesn't involve letting the rest of us starve or actively having us killed
What people don't understand is that dictators don't kill everyone because they're just monsters.
Well, they are monsters, but the reason they do it is because it's kill or be killed for them. You have to eliminate threats before they eliminate you.
And believe me, LOTS of people will want to depose a world dictator.
Given the rate of progress in robotics, if AI works then there won't be anyone left standing to worry about.
That's the whole point of doing it fast, otherwise yes they will attempt to slow things down so they can take advantage of the intermediate state where some are still standing, temporarily, to get rid of the others. And that is very much what a lot of the current pausing noise is in aid of.
Some people are sad others are very happy
Assuming 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.
The 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.
Elites will be the ones that hold the capital.
We 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.
The Ai overlords have been banging this drum for over a decade with Altman posting about the need for Universal Basic Income on here in 2016.
I didn't remember/realize this so I went searching [1] and found multiple sources e.g. [2]
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483401600&dateRange=custom&...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13207552
Lmao this is hilarious.
I’m not a SWE (I’m retired) but this idea that hurrrr durr - if SWE’s are fked so is everyone else!
No this is wrong - it may hurt your ego but get over it.
What software is and what software engineers do is pretty unique compared with other industries and what workers do.
And it just so happens producing software is uniquely suited to llm’s.
Moreover much of software will become consolidated - and that’ll be a big contributor to layoffs.
Who do you think will be the biggest beneficiary of this affect on software?
The big bad govt.
Congrats fellas!
>- if SWE’s are fked so is everyone else!
- Technical writers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- Graphics designers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- SWE: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- everybody else: Haha, Idiots, it will never be me. <- We are here.
Technical writers?
Mate that job was outsourced to places like India years ago.
Moreover who’s actually getting laid off?
The bozo’s whose value was questionable.
The good ones remain.
Market does its thing. And?
Moreover who’s actually getting exterminated?
The species whose value was questionable.
The good ones remain.
LLM's are perfectly capable of replacing tons of jobs in fields like marketing, corporate communications, journalism etc. Also, as price of software is driven down thanks to LLM's, more custom software can be built to automate all kinds of tasks in many fields, tasks that were not previously economically viable to automate. You are delusional if you think SWE's will be fkd and all other white collar professions will be fine.
The way I see it, few professions will be completely replaced, but people using LLM's as their tools will do more work, reducing the need for labour. Humans in many, many fields will focus more on quality assurance, less on the daily tasks they used to do.
Dismissive, uninformed, and in denial is not an attractive combination of traits to have.
Oh here come the boosters!
Bring your facts you plank.
The economy is fine. And will continue to be.
I'm not being a doomer. But knowledge workers are going to be replaced en masse. Maybe you can't see it because you don't have to watch the computer do more of your job every year, but it's here.
If you feel gleeful because it won't effect you, don't worry, it will.
Any job that requires human working on computers to complete tasks is slowly becoming irrelevant where the computers themselves do the work.
How many people now make their living completing tasks on computers?
Let me go ask my brother who works at pwc as a partner - who has yet to lay off a single person in the entire firm since the llm-hype+boom. They’re also hiring more than ever.
You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious.
"Look at me, I collected a single data point, I am so SMRT. Fooled U suckers!"
Please at least attempt to have a big more rigor in your standards.
>You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious. Please do not lump all HN posters in one category, and if you insist on doing so, please be courteous and generous with your interpretation of their words. As an aside, I had to look up what pwc is because they're totally irrelevant to me. But in general, it costs you nothing to tell people to spend years retraining their hard-earned skills, which is roughly what your advice is worth. You can't promise that the industry they pivot into will exist by the time they qualify to work in it, and the cost of their career retraining is denominated in time they don't get back. Nor will you be there for their journey to even know if they made it.
Funny how it works. To me you are delusional and living in a bubble. Your stance would’ve made (some, not much though) year ago, but today it’s just dumb.
there are many many jobs that largely consist of sending emails and answering phones all day
Or generating spreadsheets, or sitting in meetings, or operating any other kind of software.
That can all be replaced with AI. Carpenters, flight attendants, etc. won't yet, because robotics just isn't there yet. You need humans to move things in irregular ways. But everyone else can be replaced.
I 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.
I 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”.
This 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.
ambition: the feeling of innate dissatisfaction that motivates one into fixing a problem that doesn't exist.
you ambitious people have destroyed the world and humanity. if you had an ounce of self awareness you would hide your face in shame.
Those who decided its not enough to survive from hunting and gathering are demons. Farmers are rotten and their putrid large brains know nothing but more. Same mentality behind paraphelia btw. Those who are never satisfied build a hell out of their yearning. Simple minded folk deserve better than you demons. I only feel bad for them, everyone else, enjoy your suffering, you have recieved exactly what you deserve.
For 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...
This 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.
Relatable. 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.
Came 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.
Kudos 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.
It’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.
Unless you were literally the best engineer on the planet, it was always the case that someone could do what you do better and faster. Now, we're either at or approaching a world where even the best engineer on the planet has the same reaction as you. The playing field has been reset. The question for your future is which of you can make better use of the genius engineer in your pocket. Perhaps that involves a different set of tasks than you imagined yourself doing, but fundamentally, all good knowledge work is just creative problem solving. If you were good at that at one level of abstraction, I would bet you will be good at it at another.
I 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.
Large swaths of the population have more free time than ever before and they spend most of it scrolling. I am pessimistic
Well that’s because most people work all day and come home tired. It’s tough to self actualize when you’re too tired to think.
And I don’t even know if it’s true that people have more free time. A lot of people have side hustles like Uber or whatever to make extra money.
Super 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.
There 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Kudos 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Funny 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.
>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.
Income loss is a different question, it's not about your identity, which is what the post is about.
The author does say it's a potential threat to his career and income so clearly he would have something to worry about even if his identity was built on something else.
I agree with you though, the foundation of your identity shouldn't be your career. It's a very fragile thing in today's world.
This 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)
Good 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Llm 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
The 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.
were the horses sad too?
I 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.
Tangentially, attaching a video of yourself reading your own blogpost is a really great format.
One 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.
AI 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.
Same.
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.
I 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.
so 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.
I 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.
I don’t think you can tell someone why they are sad, better than they can, can you?
If 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.
Two 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.
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.
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
> 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).
I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI.
Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards.
The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such.
Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.
It'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.
AI 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.
It 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.
This 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.
I 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.
> DEI is industry propaganda to divide and conquer. This is now accepted.
Neither true, nor accepted.
The 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.
Using 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.
This dinosaur is obsolete because people who know how to program AND learn AI tools will have jobs and he won't. Learn to Claude.
> 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
I 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.
I 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.
It'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?
It only doesn’t make sense with our current economic framework. I think we need UBI soon or we risk having a massive crisis
I 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.
The 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.
You 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.
Deletionists 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.
Looks like you can walk it, so horse is likely to work, too?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX26xVTL2HsBxqPH6
You 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.
At work the pace has increased so much that there really isn't room for writing by hand.
I'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)
stop 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...
on 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
>> 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.
> 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.
Making any external thing one's identity is a recipe for disaster when it goes away.
I 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 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.
It 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.
This 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.
Excellent 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.
> 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.
> 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
I'm too sad about recipe sites to empathize.
This 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)
I 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.
Overpaid 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.
But why organize and risk getting a few of us fired when we can just wait and do nothing comfortably?
> Overpaid techies
boot tasting connoisseur is always safe from any automation.
Right 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.
Marx 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.
They’re not selling their own slice of labor though. They’re effectively employees that have to pay a bunch of costs that would be covered by their employer if they were classified correctly.
This 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.
(HN moderator here)
> I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it
Please don't do that.
Someone emailed us a link to your comment and was concerned that you were in this level of distress. I didn't have another way of getting in touch with you, so I thought I'd post here and say that there are strangers on HN who care. Perhaps they (or we, rather - I'll include myself too) can't do much beyond that, but I hope it makes at least a small difference.
Ending it is never the answer, I pray that you will get help. There is meaning in the struggle, even the struggle against meaninglessness.
It’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.
As 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.
I 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+M...
No. 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-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.
I have to admit, as a former JW, the linked article is actually not proselytizing, instead it's actually got worthwhile advice.
We are each here for a reason and we all touch many lives. We may not ever know, while we're on this earth, many of the important roles we play, just by being ourselves.
I'll add. I once got stopped by a bunch of JW. And I wanted to practice my Dutch, and they were willing to talk to me in Dutch.
They showed me a video about depression. And it was actually exceptionally good advice. It spoke about speaking to a therapist. There was a small bit about prayer, which was obviously not my bag. But I was pleasantly surprised at how grounded the advice was.
Hopefully their advice includes: "take this advice, and then don't join the Jehovah's Witnesses. It's a high control abusive religion that will make your depression worse".
I often feel like this as well. It's hard to talk about it with people, because they panic and immediately start sending you literature about suicidality and giving you hotlines, etc, etc, as if I haven't already seen all of that before.
I'm not actively suicidal or anything (and I know all the signs of risk, and what to do about it), but there's an underlying feeling that life just hurts and has no meaning. Currently the thing that helps me stick around is the idea of "doing it for the plot". Life ends in short order either way, so I figure I'll just stick around and keep it interesting.
ai doesn't care what you feel }:->{
Strangely, 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.
To be fair communism doesn't care what you feel either only what the party feels