Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.
I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.
If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.
Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.
>Is it that I want it to be done? Would it have been done if I didn't? (Additionality)
>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)
>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)
>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.
Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].
I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.
No, usual people still can't replace software engineers. I've been trying to teach relatives to get software projects up by getting the best models on their hands. Explain how the desktop apps for the big AI company works. Even setup skills so they have some good initial direction.
In summary, it does not work. They don't know what to ask. They usually ask the wrong things and get bad result. Get demotivated and get back to me. In the end, I learned something about myself.
I got used to my knowledge and mental models about computers. I talk about computer on work and therefore have a biased view on the general understanding about informatics. Even though I know people are not experts, it is easy to not actually understand where people stand.
Critical thinking and expertise, specially on a technology that is in high demand, is extremely valuable. Don't let bias blind you to that.
Sorry, it was always meaningless. The shiny toys just distracted our attention enough to trick us into thinking there's a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. But now we can reach the end of the rainbow and it's emptiness.
Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.
Might be tolerable if it would have given us fully automated utopia, but instead we get to watch the world burn and know nobody’s gonna do anything about it.
I agree that AI is a gamechanger in many ways, however it is not the end of life or the end of civilization. Life will go on, and people will be happy productive members of society, even with AI becoming part of everyday life - at least that is what I believe, since believing the alternative would be self defeating.
When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.
Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.
Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.
This is a form of ego death and should be taken seriously.
Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.
What are you like when no one is watching?
Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.
Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.
The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.
Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.
I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.
We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.
The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.
Yes, but it's more because I haven't had substantial work in a long time and less about AI/ML specifically. Despite limitless info at our fingertips, tech interviewers have doubled-down on asking one to recite memorized facts point blank, which I was never great at as a generalist and now seems completely obsolete.
IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.
Anyone with internet connection, a phone/laptop, and a few dollars to spare can create anything. Earlier it was not like this.
All of a sudden, your competition is anyone from anywhere in the world. Yes, to really make a million dollars, you need more than making the software. Even if you end up making a million dollars, you have 1000s of copy-cats from all parts of the world stealing your pie in no time. An average Joe will have tough time knowing which one is good and which ones to avoid.
Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?
I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.
On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.
If you want to get excited… think about all the things that ever got you excited about the future. Then think about how you basically had to defer the possibility of them happening in your lifetime.
Readjust your timelines! Determine what is the most amazing thing that could happen, that you could contribute to, by orchestrating computation effectively.
Thank you for asking this. I am in my 40s and have been working with computers and programming since my teens. I am considered as a good developer in my circle but have slowly started to lose my motivation.
Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.
Not particularly because: the LLMs can code, but holy hell can they not operate or plan appropriately for ACTUALLY high stakes operational situations. When you absolutely cannot cause downtime, if you hand Fable/Sol/Kimi the reigns and say "do this 30 million token novel thing and absolutely don't screw up customer traffic" they'll blow it after the first compaction, every time.
This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.
On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.
On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.
Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.
(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)
Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.
Well, I think there will be a new market of developers, creating niche "Hand Made" products in a way, where you may not have the scale that AI allows, but you have a lot of pricing power.
Plus, AI is really overblown; Silicon Valley seems to want to make everything a new paradigm. I feel like AI is something of a feature and company enhancer; 95% of AI enterprise startups will die because of Switching Costs + Bundling features.
I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.
Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!
Do something ai can't take from you.
I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.
idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.
I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.
Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.
make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.
Startups aren’t dead. Software businesses aren’t dead. 90% of the traditional buyers of software aren’t building and deploying their own apps from scratch. With a little thinking, creativity, and confidence, you too can make things and sell them for money in 2026.
Ditto. I've started reading recently. The last time I seriously read a book was High School. It's rather enjoyable, and I have a newfound appreciation for public libraries.
If anyone hasn't read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams is absolutely hilarious.
The coffins stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that only appeared to be white marble.
Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb.
Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.
I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!
I'm in a shitty place for working as a dev, and I still get recruiters knocking. What they're offering is not great, but that's because the market here is shit. At least there's something!
Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
why write programming languages if LLMs are fast enough to talk plaintext everything to eachother with perfect memory
At some point (soon), the massive inefficiency of this system will stop being subsidized. Also, it’s nondeterministic and unreliable.
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
Well, that makes sense too. I don't believe evolution of programming languages is just going to halt here, but that's just like my opinion man.
Perfect* memory
*semi-perfect
I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.
I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.
If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.
Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.
>Is it that I want it to be done? Would it have been done if I didn't? (Additionality)
>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)
>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)
>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.
Amit Patel, via https://digitalseams.com/blog/amit-patel-on-making-things
> enable cheats in a game
Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].
I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
No, usual people still can't replace software engineers. I've been trying to teach relatives to get software projects up by getting the best models on their hands. Explain how the desktop apps for the big AI company works. Even setup skills so they have some good initial direction.
In summary, it does not work. They don't know what to ask. They usually ask the wrong things and get bad result. Get demotivated and get back to me. In the end, I learned something about myself.
I got used to my knowledge and mental models about computers. I talk about computer on work and therefore have a biased view on the general understanding about informatics. Even though I know people are not experts, it is easy to not actually understand where people stand.
Critical thinking and expertise, specially on a technology that is in high demand, is extremely valuable. Don't let bias blind you to that.
Sorry, it was always meaningless. The shiny toys just distracted our attention enough to trick us into thinking there's a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. But now we can reach the end of the rainbow and it's emptiness.
Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.
Nothing will satisfy us because our emptiness was never meant to be filled with code, knowledge, or whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvOrTq4Bes
Might be tolerable if it would have given us fully automated utopia, but instead we get to watch the world burn and know nobody’s gonna do anything about it.
I agree that AI is a gamechanger in many ways, however it is not the end of life or the end of civilization. Life will go on, and people will be happy productive members of society, even with AI becoming part of everyday life - at least that is what I believe, since believing the alternative would be self defeating.
When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.
Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.
Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.
Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323932
I can relate to the cheats analogy. But there are still plenty of other games left to play.
This is a form of ego death and should be taken seriously.
Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.
What are you like when no one is watching?
Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.
Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.
The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.
Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.
I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.
We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.
What do you think? Still meaningless?
Hey, congrats on coming up on a birthday that ends in 0. Mine was just 5-0. I can give you two pieces of possible advice:
- nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky.
- the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.
The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.
Yes, but it's more because I haven't had substantial work in a long time and less about AI/ML specifically. Despite limitless info at our fingertips, tech interviewers have doubled-down on asking one to recite memorized facts point blank, which I was never great at as a generalist and now seems completely obsolete.
IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.
Anyone can do it? Is everyone you know making a million dollars a year with their software startup? Are you?
Anyone with internet connection, a phone/laptop, and a few dollars to spare can create anything. Earlier it was not like this.
All of a sudden, your competition is anyone from anywhere in the world. Yes, to really make a million dollars, you need more than making the software. Even if you end up making a million dollars, you have 1000s of copy-cats from all parts of the world stealing your pie in no time. An average Joe will have tough time knowing which one is good and which ones to avoid.
I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!
Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?
I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.
On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.
This is how I feel too!
If you want to get excited… think about all the things that ever got you excited about the future. Then think about how you basically had to defer the possibility of them happening in your lifetime.
Readjust your timelines! Determine what is the most amazing thing that could happen, that you could contribute to, by orchestrating computation effectively.
I mean we don’t even have a cure for cancer yet!
The thing you describe was perfectly addressed, as far as I can tell, in a piece of short fiction about AI that was written in 2021.
https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...
Thank you for asking this. I am in my 40s and have been working with computers and programming since my teens. I am considered as a good developer in my circle but have slowly started to lose my motivation.
Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.
Family, community, religion are pretty timeless and universal.
Doing what matters has become essential; discerning what that is, less clear.
Not particularly because: the LLMs can code, but holy hell can they not operate or plan appropriately for ACTUALLY high stakes operational situations. When you absolutely cannot cause downtime, if you hand Fable/Sol/Kimi the reigns and say "do this 30 million token novel thing and absolutely don't screw up customer traffic" they'll blow it after the first compaction, every time.
This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.
there's still ego & competition against other humans which is what I do to distract myself
Yes, but also no.
On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.
On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.
Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.
(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)
Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.
Well, I think there will be a new market of developers, creating niche "Hand Made" products in a way, where you may not have the scale that AI allows, but you have a lot of pricing power.
Plus, AI is really overblown; Silicon Valley seems to want to make everything a new paradigm. I feel like AI is something of a feature and company enhancer; 95% of AI enterprise startups will die because of Switching Costs + Bundling features.
https://s-1.vercel.app/
I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.
Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!
Do something ai can't take from you.
I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.
idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.
Thank you for sharing. I hope your bug-hunting goes well.
I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.
Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.
make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.
Startups aren’t dead. Software businesses aren’t dead. 90% of the traditional buyers of software aren’t building and deploying their own apps from scratch. With a little thinking, creativity, and confidence, you too can make things and sell them for money in 2026.
Find something that has meaning to you.
Ditto. I've started reading recently. The last time I seriously read a book was High School. It's rather enjoyable, and I have a newfound appreciation for public libraries.
If anyone hasn't read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams is absolutely hilarious.
Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb.
Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.
I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!
As a backend/full-stack engineer I still receive at least a few linkedin recruiter messages a week.
curious how long have you been in the field?
I'm in a shitty place for working as a dev, and I still get recruiters knocking. What they're offering is not great, but that's because the market here is shit. At least there's something!