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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 passionately 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
I've been worried about AI replacing programmers since the release of ChatGPT 3.5. And I've been consistently surprised through all of that time that people didn't see it coming.
For example, from early February 2025:
> I'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here.
> AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this year.
> We have a system that is similar to top humans at competitive programming. This wasn't true 1 year ago. Who knows what will happen in 1 year.
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 are retired and sound like a conservative who soon be cheering on Universal Basic Income "if," you follow and agree with everything the president says.
As you can see in June he says he's met with the Ai overlords about giving out free money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7lQEpKzVY4 Then two months later he is banging the drum about highly unpopular data centers & now he wants to give free 5k checks away for voting red (lol). The natural progression of what the Ai overlords have champion for a decade is what he will champion next too Universal Basic Income (aka welfare checks) because the overlords see the future and have sold the president on it too!
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s interesting to me that people found 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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-improvident 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
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 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 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 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.
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...
This person is responding healthily. 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 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.
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.
yeah i mean i like chopping woods (i like the smell of it and personal satisfaction) and once upon a time people made money out of it. but hey, here come industrial revolution
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 passionately 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, you're probably thinking 30 years ago; not any time recent. Indy devs are still a thing though.
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.
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 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.
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.
The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.
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.
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.
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?
For example, from early February 2025:
> I'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here.
> AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this year.
> We have a system that is similar to top humans at competitive programming. This wasn't true 1 year ago. Who knows what will happen in 1 year.
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.
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.
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483401600&dateRange=custom&...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13207552
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!
- 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.
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?
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.
Bring your facts you plank.
The economy is fine. And will continue to be.
If you feel gleeful because it won't effect you, don't worry, it will.
How many people now make their living completing tasks on computers?
You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious.
Please at least attempt to have a big more rigor in your standards.
stop crying.
You want rigour? Look at the unemployment rate. Under your emotion and tone the unemployment rate should be high. It’s not.
Again stop crying bro.
As you can see in June he says he's met with the Ai overlords about giving out free money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7lQEpKzVY4 Then two months later he is banging the drum about highly unpopular data centers & now he wants to give free 5k checks away for voting red (lol). The natural progression of what the Ai overlords have champion for a decade is what he will champion next too Universal Basic Income (aka welfare checks) because the overlords see the future and have sold the president on it too!
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 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 should probably look broader...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the record, I still do all my coding without using any LLM.
* 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 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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately I am not sure the 'tech' industry will have a lot of use for me, pretty soon.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/harrys-cdnx-prod/manual/Harry%27s+M...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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-improvident 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
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.
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.
> 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 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 just, yes, like all of us .. the temptation is there to not do that.
So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.
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.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX26xVTL2HsBxqPH6
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
Class consciousness y’all. You’re smart enough to Marx and Piketty so do it.
boot tasting connoisseur is always safe from any automation.
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.
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.