Feeling Sad about AI

ignatif

ai doesn't care what you feel }:->{

UltraSane

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.

asdfman123

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.

juiceland

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.

throwaway1921

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.

abnry

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.

datakan

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.

david927

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.

ploden

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.

postalcoder

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.

spijdar

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.

flyingshelf

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.

alexambarch

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.

darkwi11ow

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

Quarrelsome

> I think I've felt sad because of the disrespect. How is this to do with AI? When were we ever respected as an profession? My career has given me considerable experience of non-technical people in senior positions having limited respect for those with technical skills and running roughshod over their interests. The exceptions to this rule were mostly either theatre or a fortunate consequence of people like us getting into those senior roles. That's not even beginning to count all the masses incapable of perceiving us. Consider the outpouring of hatred for AI over artists and the scant sympathy for any of us. The sorrow is mostly the status quo returning in typical money driven orgs. If you read stories of the 80s then technical staff were incredibly poorly treated and paid and those voices will rise again, empowered by their hubris and slop. The only positive is now its easier to replicate the conditions of those orgs as you don't need to shell out over $100k per annum for a dev, given that these tools are considerably cheaper. This means we could compete with those forces without needing their pockets. We could even collaborate and somewhat destroy all those companies. However we wont because we're more interested in little puzzle boxes and arguing at great length about what something should be called until finally agreeing upon one of the very worst options.

kenjackson

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.

hax0ron3

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.

bitpush

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.

wizy

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...

unified101

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.