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- Hacker News
- 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.
by kenjackson - I don't know how much this helps you (or anyone else), but, yeah, I understand.
I was a pilot. I lived flying. I loved flying. I loved flying more than myself even, and it was such a major part of my identity that the vestiges of that define many of my understandings of the world.
Then I got sick. And I lost everything (except for my loved ones) trying to get better. And I rebuilt, and fostered a new identity. I went to grad school and studied CS and AI stuff. I built myself a new identity as a software engineer and stats dabbler. I published a paper or two and now I'm watching that identity evaporate as now I spend most of my time shepherding AI agents. But...
I also learned the first time that my worth as a human being was not based on "what I did for money." I also learned that I was adaptable. I also learned that I could learn and change and grow and do so for the things I wanted to learn. I am the master of my fate. I'm the captain of my soul.
The grief will pass, and when it does you will emerge better than you were before. Forged. I'm sorry you're going through this and that it makes you sad, but you'll need to adapt. You'll need to keep moving forward. You'll need to get a better definition of what you want to do in this changed world, because the reality is that the old universe is gone. It's never coming back.
Mourn, but then get up and start to move through this new world. That's the only advice I have, I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better - but if you try to compete, you'll die like John Henry. Now, is time to adapt. You'll make it, you might not like it - but you'll be ok. After all, it's just a job.
by piloto_ciego - 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.
by alexambarch - 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.
by brokencode - 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.by deepwoods
- > 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
by 1attice - 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.
by mindwok - 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.
by stickfigure - 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.
by spijdar - 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.
by sweetheart - 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.by xp84
- 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.
by reenorap - 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...
by sigbottle - 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.by Primer81
- 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”.
- 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.
by asdfman123 - 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!
by urue - 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.by paul7986
- Some people are sad others are very happyby uraloser
- > 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.
by fidotron - 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.
by datakan - 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.by stale2002
- 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.
by hdgvhicv - If you haven’t already… show him how to use codex or claude or whatever. And let him start having fun and making games.by thesis
- 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.
by qarl - 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.
by thatmf - 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.by vaylian
- 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 itby pram
- 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.
by abnry - 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.
by ericmcer