Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.
I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.
If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.
Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.
>Is it that I want it to be done? Would it have been done if I didn't? (Additionality)
>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)
>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)
>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.
I envy your enthusiasm. I sincerely enjoyed being proficient at something that was hard to replace, and still feel pride for it. There's still avenues like that, but they've grown thinner and it's not as one-sided. I'm still very happy to be in this field and keep toiling away, but with less joy.
> I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist
Isn't that extrinsic motivation? You're motivated by the desire to bring something outside of yourself into existence. The software project doesn't exist within you.
I thought I was the only one, so burnt out from software engineering I am glad to be out of a job. I am starting to have physical revulsion at the thought of it, and I have been dealing with the fact that I have even lost my fun time in front of the PC, playing games or browsing. These days I literally feel better doing the dishes than opening Steam or watching YouTube.
If it’s only me, I can say it’s burnout and depression, if it’s an entire class of people, then the world is sick.
As for AI, I have mellowed in my extreme doomer position, though I still believe people have unrealistically high expectations and the reality of it is gonna hit tech very hard in the face soon.
Perhaps AI has instilled into me an appreciation for the human creativity, and humanity as a whole, and there’s not much of it to be found online. The Internet was an exciting place where we came to develop our nerdy selves, and today we find out it is a smelly, dirty, shanty town with open air sewer. It’s time to unplug.
I did my taxes on paper instead of digitally this year because of the same anti-computer feeling. It’s a very magnificent feeling, I do find it kind of interesting how I came to feel this way.
This is a form of ego death and should be taken seriously.
Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.
What are you like when no one is watching?
Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.
Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.
The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.
Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.
Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].
I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.
I'm basically unable to work on boring things without LLMs now because it just doesn't feel like a good use of my time. I am also unable to work on thinks that are mostly vibecoded, by hand, because I know the code is bad, and I know the work will often be surpassed by a model in 1/5 the time once I get tokens again. This is not a "AI is replacing me" comment, but more a "The 90% of my job that takes time and that nobody wants to do is now automated, and not using LLMs is no longer motivationally an option". Vibecoded projects have short term rewards but long term I just find I don't really care, its not "my project" and I'm not proud of it.
I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.
I think the phenomena we are experiencing is "change". That's what change looks like. Out with the old, in with the new. It feels like nothing matters only because this is all happening too fast.
Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.
You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.
Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.
A lot of the old world's benefit was the gatekeeping of (legitimate) knowledge and understanding. You had to spend a lot of time to grok it, and you could then exploit this for money.
LLMs completely kill this gatekeeping, for good or bad. And we're seeing the after effects. I don't know how to feel about this.
I agree that AI is a gamechanger in many ways, however it is not the end of life or the end of civilization. Life will go on, and people will be happy productive members of society, even with AI becoming part of everyday life - at least that is what I believe, since believing the alternative would be self defeating.
When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.
Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.
Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.
Sorry, it was always meaningless. The shiny toys just distracted our attention enough to trick us into thinking there's a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. But now we can reach the end of the rainbow and it's emptiness.
Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.
Ideas and execution is basically dead, because any idiot with a keyboard and a spare hour and some api credits can build almost anything you can now.
I myself have built so much shit lately but it all feels incredibly shallow.
I used to get joy from software, now it feels like fast fashion. Even systems engineering and low level code. Fast fashion. Derivative shit, flung at the void.
I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.
We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.
2. why haven't we developed organs in the lab yet?
3. why haven't we invented space travel yet?
4. why haven't we solved food, shelter, cover for all human beings on planet earth yet?
5. why don't we have absolute democracy and have hold politicians accountable for their inaction, exploit and abuse? (specifically using Software and AI). Where are the dashboards of all public info of each politicians with organization chart of each country representing top leader with nodes of people working under him/her and further down.
Because AI isn't for us. It's for those ruling over us. A simple proof would be that working hours haven't reduced despite "increase in productivity" claimed by everyone. Some companies more demand 30 to 50% more work due to AI
I don't think (5) is called "democracy", but it sounds nice. Democracy is "everyone gets a vote", which devolves into a battle of populists. There's nothing in democracy that would guarantee the kind of accountability you are describing.
Besides, as soon as you introduce this kind of checking, you'll just cement the oligarchy. The winning strategy would be for a billionaire not officially in government to work their magic through a puppet with a clean tax report.
It is that we are governed by those chosen by us to represent us. In a perfect democracy the government is (the majority of) us. Hence the saying … “in a democracy the people get the government they deserve”.
Some modern definitions of democracy include openness, non-corruption, freedom and liberty. Most definitions in use today probably incldue more than just "everyone gets a vote".
We have to adapt. This what happened to textile workers during Industrial Revolution. Satisfaction of crafting things disappeared once machines automated the work. I literally hesitated to code manually again because I've figured out how to drive this “creature” properly. It can do almost anything faster than me. (for production context).
Upgrade toward sales and management ?. At least cover our basic daily needs, so we still have freedom to explore different interesting domains.
I feel sorry for brilliant engineers who rely too heavily on their technical skills, because those skills can become almost "irrelevant" in day-to-day work.
Some of them literally refuse to adopt AI in their problem-solving process. They still can't accept that “my hard-earned knowledge from decades of learning can be wiped out in just one day.”
All I ever wanted to do in this universe was fly airplanes. And I did it professionally for nearly 15 years. Then I got sick, and couldn’t do it anymore. Suddenly, all my skills were meaningless and unemployable.
I got over it. But it took time. I reinvented myself - I had always liked writing code. So I pivoted to this and literally went back to grad school to study AI.
I’m watching a lot of people right now flounder like I did in the first year or so after I got sick. They’re grieving. They’ll move beyond it, but it’s immensely painful to them right now.
I really feel for you. One of my friends was also a pilot, licensed to fly Airbus planes. He had to quit because of COVID. I still remember seeing Thai Airways pilots and crew working as street vendors during that time.
It’s become much harder to get back into the airline industry now because of the supply-demand situation.
Anyway, my friend now became regular staff at local factory, doing something completely unrelated to aviation and aerospace knowledge. It’s really painful to break out of our “locked-in” comfort zone.
Not covid for me, but around that time. One of the last things I did before I got sick that year was fly Covid patients out of rural areas. It was a very stressful time - especially when I was so damn tired all the time for no real apparent reason. Whatever, I'm on the mend now more or less.
I would go back tomorrow if I could, but I also recognize that chapter of my life is over, over 7000hrs is enough for one life time. But maybe I'll get lucky, and medicine will advance? I'm not holding my breath.
Reguardless, that's what I see, people grieving and being ANGRY because they aren't quite sure what to do with their newfound uselessness. I was that way for a long while. The feeling like you're not a part of it anymore, or that all that work and effort, was for nought.
But if anyone reading this is struggling with these sorts of feelings (like OP), understand that the experiences that brought you here, they are what make you who you are! They're a part of you! But they don't totally make you up. You should use your perspective to see if you can make even more crazy and creative and magnificent things than you ever could before! And most importantly, do it for you.
Society is really going to be totally overturned by this. The responses I see, the attitudes people have, a lot of it is stuff I just lived through a couple years ago. Good luck folks, you should probably go hiking more.
A key reason is that so many CS concepts are already well packaged in very nice libraries or frameworks. And unfortunately many people do not have to use very advanced CS concepts. Look at the so-called top 10 algorithms or data structures for <your favorite area>, how many of them are invented recently, and how many of them do not have an amazing library of production quality? Note this does not mean that the CS field is not advancing. It's just that we have yet to find another hyper-growth area that demands novel algorithm, except probably the AI infra - except that only very few people get to work on that area.
The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.
I've tried AI and it takes either an expert to steer and evaluate or enormous patience and some level of expertise to make it work at all.
Its a false sense of efficacy. Like looking at a dating app and thinking you could date any or all those people: the reality is no you can't and you don't even know it.
Then why not just do the things you want to/can instead of the things you have to?
I am unemployed and surviving since last 4 years and being creative every day. In between I am also doing what I really want to do.
I have raised my bar really high to weed out the shitty employers and companies after 16 years in the industry and focus on what I want to do. I believe the money will just follow. It always has for me.
> Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.
Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?
I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.
On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.
If you want to get excited… think about all the things that ever got you excited about the future. Then think about how you basically had to defer the possibility of them happening in your lifetime.
Readjust your timelines! Determine what is the most amazing thing that could happen, that you could contribute to, by orchestrating computation effectively.
Yes, but it's more because I haven't had substantial work in a long time and less about AI/ML specifically. Despite limitless info at our fingertips, tech interviewers have doubled-down on asking one to recite memorized facts point blank, which I was never great at as a generalist and now seems completely obsolete.
Sometimes. Have you ever played a single player game where there are achievements, goals, strategies to be had (...). You can often get addicted (eg Factorio) trying to optimize, make the best of your limited resources.
But then you realise you're spending too much time on it. And you just want to see the ending. So you enter the cheat codes to make it easy. You blast through everything, you get to the last levels and still easy. And things start feeling meaningless and pointless, and in fact, probably because of that, you quickly lose interest in the game completely.
It now feels like we're in the end game.
For hundreds of thousands of years we struggled with finding food, be it foraging or hunting, both of which requiring a lot of skill, dealing with several difficult diseases throughout adulthood, droughts, finding new places to stay for the night, for food.
And now... all we do is sit 8h per day in front of a screen, and everything else is taken care of. We can even have sex without having babies and a huge lifelong commitement. A first! The pleasures that it unlocks. We have food from all over the world at our fingertips. A feast no hunter-gatherer tribe would ever in their wildest dreams could even conceive of. We have cameras streaming animals from all over the world, lions killing impalas recorded being uploaded for the pleasure of people who watch it on youtube, or simply fledgling birds and their progress, we monitor the weather on all of Earth. We convert sunlight into thunder energy, and make thinking machines from rock. Truly, feels like the last levels of a game where we have the cheat codes.
A fish will rarely ask himself "what is water?". It just is. That's just how it is. So we also tend not to realise the ridiculousness of the world we live in because we have been born in it. Even more so younger generations. Some of us have seen the world rapidly changing at an increasingly faster pace. This all we have today is NOT normal. We live in the equivalent of a fraction of the blink of an eye to human existence.
Of course, we stress. A lot. Our mental health has never been worse. But this is feels like the end game. Our 'progressivism' and 'Libertarianism' led us to change a lot without thinking of the consequences. And here we are, reaching the finish line, unprepared. Our systems, laws, mental stability have no have time to adapt.
On the contrary, only when we're an immortal, intergalactic species that has mastered the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe, there might be nothing left for us to do and you could make this complaint. Until then the number of challenges we have to overcome is basically infinite, and we finally have the powers needed to make any kind of meaningful progress on it.
There is the pesky little matter of jobs and paying rent and capitalism which will cause a lot of turmoil for a very long time, but once we get past that we have our work cut out for us.
"You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."
I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.
I don't feel this way at all - and I'm in my late 40s. I'm excited about the future of technology, not only because of AI but also other opportunities next-gen GPUs and new power-efficient processors bring. RISC V. Cheap PCB manufacturing. Cheaper FPGAs and, perhaps, even homebrew ASICs. Much to be excited about.
And look around you - so much pain and suffering in the world. Lots and lots of problems to be solved, hopefully helped by all this technology.
Might be tolerable if it would have given us fully automated utopia, but instead we get to watch the world burn and know nobody’s gonna do anything about it.
I have spoken to many professionals and looked at some companies usage. I can definitely tell we are in a bubble.
I noticed when a non-tech person tries to solve a problem with AI, they only tend to think in-terms on LLM. For e.g. even for a calculator app they use LLM for compute instead of direct calculation.
Sure they have managed to solve it. But they are remotely usable.
I have seen multiple failed projects taking these vibe coded ideas to production.
If AI was actually as good as the VCs and execs want you to believe, there would be tons of new and exciting things being created every day and new opportunities for everyone. There isn’t though, the one cool new technology is the coding agents themselves. But there’s no amazing software, no awesome new games or movies, no breakthrough medicine, no new foods or biotech, no fun electronics or gadgets. Coca Cola couldn’t even make a decent 1 minute commercial with gen AI and millions of dollars, it was just a random sequence of trains driving through snow. Where is the promised techno utopia? It’s all just slop. The malaise is from these VCs force feeding us all slop and telling us this is the future. I’m not saying current AI isn’t impressive or useful, I’m just saying it hasn’t really made anything better yet. I don’t think it’ll be that way forever though. I’m still long term bullish on AI, I just don’t think transformers are enough. We need something that enhances creativity and innovation, that improves quality, not just make it faster and cheaper to put together mediocre products.
I think things will turn around by the end of next year, but not before some major reckoning. There is a lot of motivated reasoning going on right now with trillions of dollars at stake where people aren’t being discerning and honest about what AI is actually capable of, and a lot of circular cash flow that’s making it seem more successful than it really is. I think when it really arrives, we’ll see a creative explosion that enriches our lives, where everything isn’t just cheaper to make at 80% of its former quality but actually better quality too. And I believe the solutions for improving quality will surface the things that human beings can uniquely do that AI can’t and give meaning back to our lives, but right now we’re in a shitty in between phase.
Thank you for asking this. I am in my 40s and have been working with computers and programming since my teens. I am considered as a good developer in my circle but have slowly started to lose my motivation.
Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.
Anyone with internet connection, a phone/laptop, and a few dollars to spare can create anything. Earlier it was not like this.
All of a sudden, your competition is anyone from anywhere in the world. Yes, to really make a million dollars, you need more than making the software. Even if you end up making a million dollars, you have 1000s of copy-cats from all parts of the world stealing your pie in no time. An average Joe will have tough time knowing which one is good and which ones to avoid.
I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.
Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!
Do something ai can't take from you.
I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.
idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.
On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.
On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.
Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.
(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)
Find a hobby that'll scratch that creative itch. I recently got into woodworking and its been a blast! The Anarchist's Tool Chest might be right up your alley [1]. Christopher just released the revised edition a few days ago. There's a link in the description to a free pdf download.
On a similar note... the whole idea behind making your own furniture is similar to hand rolling code. You can go ahead and buy a dresser or bed at ikea and call it a day, but the quality is complete shit. Or you could build something that will last a life time and be praised for it's quality.
Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.
Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.
You don’t have to get paid to make contributions to math. There are still loads of hobbyists making contributions around the world. The guy that found the aperiodic monotile was a hobbyist who collaborated with a researcher. There was a significant proof in combinatorics (lower bound on superpermutations) contributed by an anonymous 4chan poster!
Hobbyist mathematics may long outlive a lot of research mathematics, and I think that’s okay. There’s nothing in the human spirit of inquiry that necessitates academia as an all-powerful institution. Heck, there have been a lot of problems with the institution in recent years, and those have everything to do with perverse incentives and nothing to do with AI.
Sounds like you're burnt out. Maybe its time to touch some grass and think about what is really important and meaningful to you.
About 150 years ago, Nietzsche wrote
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
about the secularization of society. Perhaps something similar is happening to knowledge work now, but I think it was never a great idea to derive all your life's meaning from it anyway.
Not particularly because: the LLMs can code, but holy hell can they not operate or plan appropriately for ACTUALLY high stakes operational situations. When you absolutely cannot cause downtime, if you hand Fable/Sol/Kimi the reigns and say "do this 30 million token novel thing and absolutely don't screw up customer traffic" they'll blow it after the first compaction, every time.
This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.
Ditto. I've started reading recently. The last time I seriously read a book was High School. It's rather enjoyable, and I have a newfound appreciation for public libraries.
If anyone hasn't read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams is absolutely hilarious.
The coffins stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that only appeared to be white marble.
It’s not unusual to feel this way right now. The world is arguably in an interesting state.
One thing to keep in mind is the world probably felt this way a few times as well. During the Vietnam War and the administration at the time probably made people feel powerless to do anything. 1930s crash. Lots of other examples like this.
AI certainly seems like a unique tipping point that reaches into all aspects of humanity. So, maybe it’s different this time.
make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.
Startups aren’t dead. Software businesses aren’t dead. 90% of the traditional buyers of software aren’t building and deploying their own apps from scratch. With a little thinking, creativity, and confidence, you too can make things and sell them for money in 2026.
No one will care because it's just another addition to the mountain of slop, and the guy bagging your groceries can do it.
Did the universe bestow on you some right to code better than the guy who bags your groceries? This whole post oozes a sense of wounded, bitter entitlement.
Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb.
Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.
I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!
curious how long have you been in the field? Ive been wondering if it's my age or my LinkedIn algorithm changed for the worse in February once I updated it. I hadnt updated it in many years previously.
I am not the one who posted before. But try this to maximize LinkedIn.
Consciously, "Like" job posts. That is, in the feed section of linkedin, "like" any type of jobs that you see others post. Linkedin will show you more job posts in your feed, which others post. You "like" that too. Then it will show more job postings. Keep liking that too from your feed. But don't like or view or read any other posts while you do this. Not even your friends/partner's posts.
Do this at least 3-4 times a day, with 5-10 likes in each batch.
In a week's time, Linkedin will flood your feed with job posts from actual users. Now you become selective and like only design/web developer posts that your skills align with. Then it will bring more of it and you might be able to find something.
There are two things that happens. Recruiters/hiring managers see that you liked their post, so they check your profile. Keep it updated. Your profile visits will also go up. Linkedin sees that your profile is viewed by more recruiters, and your profile will be shown above other profiles when recruiters search using their tool.
I hope you get a job soon, and you can thank me later!
Thank you but from 2012 to Jan. 2026 I only used LInkedIn when a recruiter sent me a message about a UX Research/Design and or Developer job they were trying to fill. I would get about a handful of these messages every month for all those years.
I like being in demand and not have to chase or be in a massive pile of others vying for a job. Hence why i am getting into mid level medical jobs where there is a large shortage of these types of workers. Yet, it's less pay and more stress but stability, I get to help people and with a shortage of workers I should be able to boost my pay as I did in tech.
I'm in a shitty place for working as a dev, and I still get recruiters knocking. What they're offering is not great, but that's because the market here is shit. At least there's something!
Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
We need to start talking about real Software Engineering concepts. The stuff we will write to guide agents to build our software.
We will be building architectural blueprints for software "buildings" same as Civic Engineers and Architects do for bridges and towers.
> We will be building architectural blueprints for software "buildings" same as Civic Engineers and Architects do for bridges and towers.
If only we knew how. All we seem to know formally given popular discourse is languages, frameworks, tools, protocols and algorithms.
Thinking about how to move beyond functional decomposition and structured design to enable those “blueprints” isn’t even on the agenda?
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
why write programming languages if LLMs are fast enough to talk plaintext everything to eachother with perfect memory
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
This is totally how I’m feeling right now.
This stuff has empowered me to finish the BS I don’t want to do rapidly then do other cool stuff I want to do.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
Well, that makes sense too. I don't believe evolution of programming languages is just going to halt here, but that's just like my opinion man.
At some point (soon), the massive inefficiency of this system will stop being subsidized. Also, it’s nondeterministic and unreliable.
Perfect* memory
*semi-perfect
This Ask HN received 116 points and was on the front page. How come it vanished from the front page, the 2nd page and so forth here on HN?
This is important topic to a huge portion of HN readers and to see how were feeling / thinking during these times of uncertainity.
I mostly browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active for this reason.
Yeah it seems dang has some kind of nether region to vanish these types of discussions to. Shame, seemed to have really hit a deep nerve.
I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.
I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.
If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.
Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.
>Is it that I want it to be done? Would it have been done if I didn't? (Additionality)
>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)
>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)
>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.
Amit Patel, via https://digitalseams.com/blog/amit-patel-on-making-things
I envy your enthusiasm. I sincerely enjoyed being proficient at something that was hard to replace, and still feel pride for it. There's still avenues like that, but they've grown thinner and it's not as one-sided. I'm still very happy to be in this field and keep toiling away, but with less joy.
> I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist
Isn't that extrinsic motivation? You're motivated by the desire to bring something outside of yourself into existence. The software project doesn't exist within you.
I think you're right. The "because" should have applied to the clause that followed.
I thought I was the only one, so burnt out from software engineering I am glad to be out of a job. I am starting to have physical revulsion at the thought of it, and I have been dealing with the fact that I have even lost my fun time in front of the PC, playing games or browsing. These days I literally feel better doing the dishes than opening Steam or watching YouTube.
If it’s only me, I can say it’s burnout and depression, if it’s an entire class of people, then the world is sick.
As for AI, I have mellowed in my extreme doomer position, though I still believe people have unrealistically high expectations and the reality of it is gonna hit tech very hard in the face soon.
Perhaps AI has instilled into me an appreciation for the human creativity, and humanity as a whole, and there’s not much of it to be found online. The Internet was an exciting place where we came to develop our nerdy selves, and today we find out it is a smelly, dirty, shanty town with open air sewer. It’s time to unplug.
I did my taxes on paper instead of digitally this year because of the same anti-computer feeling. It’s a very magnificent feeling, I do find it kind of interesting how I came to feel this way.
This is a form of ego death and should be taken seriously.
Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.
What are you like when no one is watching?
Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.
Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.
The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.
Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.
Sound advice.
^hell yeah! thx
> enable cheats in a game
Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].
I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
I'm basically unable to work on boring things without LLMs now because it just doesn't feel like a good use of my time. I am also unable to work on thinks that are mostly vibecoded, by hand, because I know the code is bad, and I know the work will often be surpassed by a model in 1/5 the time once I get tokens again. This is not a "AI is replacing me" comment, but more a "The 90% of my job that takes time and that nobody wants to do is now automated, and not using LLMs is no longer motivationally an option". Vibecoded projects have short term rewards but long term I just find I don't really care, its not "my project" and I'm not proud of it.
I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.
I think the phenomena we are experiencing is "change". That's what change looks like. Out with the old, in with the new. It feels like nothing matters only because this is all happening too fast.
Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.
You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.
Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.
Understanding things still matters.
A lot of the old world's benefit was the gatekeeping of (legitimate) knowledge and understanding. You had to spend a lot of time to grok it, and you could then exploit this for money.
LLMs completely kill this gatekeeping, for good or bad. And we're seeing the after effects. I don't know how to feel about this.
So the next step is to make machines understand the things it needs to understand to solve the problems we care about.
I had this shirt that had a snarky remark on it, it said:
> I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.
The machine understanding things doesn't make us understand things. Especially when The Machine Stops™
I agree that AI is a gamechanger in many ways, however it is not the end of life or the end of civilization. Life will go on, and people will be happy productive members of society, even with AI becoming part of everyday life - at least that is what I believe, since believing the alternative would be self defeating.
When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.
Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.
Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.
Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323932
Sorry, it was always meaningless. The shiny toys just distracted our attention enough to trick us into thinking there's a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. But now we can reach the end of the rainbow and it's emptiness.
Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.
Nothing will satisfy us because our emptiness was never meant to be filled with code, knowledge, or whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvOrTq4Bes
Ideas and execution is basically dead, because any idiot with a keyboard and a spare hour and some api credits can build almost anything you can now.
I myself have built so much shit lately but it all feels incredibly shallow.
I used to get joy from software, now it feels like fast fashion. Even systems engineering and low level code. Fast fashion. Derivative shit, flung at the void.
I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.
We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.
What do you think? Still meaningless?
Hey, congrats on coming up on a birthday that ends in 0. Mine was just 5-0. I can give you two pieces of possible advice:
- nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky.
- the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.
OP: Anyone with severe depression feels like — get off the net and book a doctor's appointment.
1. why haven't we developed blood in the lab yet?
2. why haven't we developed organs in the lab yet?
3. why haven't we invented space travel yet?
4. why haven't we solved food, shelter, cover for all human beings on planet earth yet?
5. why don't we have absolute democracy and have hold politicians accountable for their inaction, exploit and abuse? (specifically using Software and AI). Where are the dashboards of all public info of each politicians with organization chart of each country representing top leader with nodes of people working under him/her and further down.
5.1. where are the alerts when a politicians takes a bribe or does insider trading?
But they say its okay for them to do it, just not the teleprompter man or any of us
Because we let them by not having the dashboard and alerts
>where are the alerts when a politicians takes a bribe or does insider trading?
They're on the front page news. And no one (with the power to do anything) cares.
Because AI isn't for us. It's for those ruling over us. A simple proof would be that working hours haven't reduced despite "increase in productivity" claimed by everyone. Some companies more demand 30 to 50% more work due to AI
5. Absolut democracy is available at the liquor store in various flavors, but has negarive long-term health effects.
I'd be happy with a sane system of taxation supporting a coherent budget.
I don't think (5) is called "democracy", but it sounds nice. Democracy is "everyone gets a vote", which devolves into a battle of populists. There's nothing in democracy that would guarantee the kind of accountability you are describing.
Besides, as soon as you introduce this kind of checking, you'll just cement the oligarchy. The winning strategy would be for a billionaire not officially in government to work their magic through a puppet with a clean tax report.
> Democracy is "everyone gets a vote"
It is that we are governed by those chosen by us to represent us. In a perfect democracy the government is (the majority of) us. Hence the saying … “in a democracy the people get the government they deserve”.
Some modern definitions of democracy include openness, non-corruption, freedom and liberty. Most definitions in use today probably incldue more than just "everyone gets a vote".
We have to adapt. This what happened to textile workers during Industrial Revolution. Satisfaction of crafting things disappeared once machines automated the work. I literally hesitated to code manually again because I've figured out how to drive this “creature” properly. It can do almost anything faster than me. (for production context).
Upgrade toward sales and management ?. At least cover our basic daily needs, so we still have freedom to explore different interesting domains.
I feel sorry for brilliant engineers who rely too heavily on their technical skills, because those skills can become almost "irrelevant" in day-to-day work.
Some of them literally refuse to adopt AI in their problem-solving process. They still can't accept that “my hard-earned knowledge from decades of learning can be wiped out in just one day.”
All I ever wanted to do in this universe was fly airplanes. And I did it professionally for nearly 15 years. Then I got sick, and couldn’t do it anymore. Suddenly, all my skills were meaningless and unemployable.
I got over it. But it took time. I reinvented myself - I had always liked writing code. So I pivoted to this and literally went back to grad school to study AI.
I’m watching a lot of people right now flounder like I did in the first year or so after I got sick. They’re grieving. They’ll move beyond it, but it’s immensely painful to them right now.
I really feel for you. One of my friends was also a pilot, licensed to fly Airbus planes. He had to quit because of COVID. I still remember seeing Thai Airways pilots and crew working as street vendors during that time.
It’s become much harder to get back into the airline industry now because of the supply-demand situation.
Anyway, my friend now became regular staff at local factory, doing something completely unrelated to aviation and aerospace knowledge. It’s really painful to break out of our “locked-in” comfort zone.
Not covid for me, but around that time. One of the last things I did before I got sick that year was fly Covid patients out of rural areas. It was a very stressful time - especially when I was so damn tired all the time for no real apparent reason. Whatever, I'm on the mend now more or less.
I would go back tomorrow if I could, but I also recognize that chapter of my life is over, over 7000hrs is enough for one life time. But maybe I'll get lucky, and medicine will advance? I'm not holding my breath.
Reguardless, that's what I see, people grieving and being ANGRY because they aren't quite sure what to do with their newfound uselessness. I was that way for a long while. The feeling like you're not a part of it anymore, or that all that work and effort, was for nought.
But if anyone reading this is struggling with these sorts of feelings (like OP), understand that the experiences that brought you here, they are what make you who you are! They're a part of you! But they don't totally make you up. You should use your perspective to see if you can make even more crazy and creative and magnificent things than you ever could before! And most importantly, do it for you.
Society is really going to be totally overturned by this. The responses I see, the attitudes people have, a lot of it is stuff I just lived through a couple years ago. Good luck folks, you should probably go hiking more.
You're right on target. Indeed this is what it is.
But, you know, we can move past that grief, and instead use it as fuel! We'll be better for it in the long run even though we might not like it now.
> Learning new CS concepts
A key reason is that so many CS concepts are already well packaged in very nice libraries or frameworks. And unfortunately many people do not have to use very advanced CS concepts. Look at the so-called top 10 algorithms or data structures for <your favorite area>, how many of them are invented recently, and how many of them do not have an amazing library of production quality? Note this does not mean that the CS field is not advancing. It's just that we have yet to find another hyper-growth area that demands novel algorithm, except probably the AI infra - except that only very few people get to work on that area.
The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.
I've tried AI and it takes either an expert to steer and evaluate or enormous patience and some level of expertise to make it work at all.
Its a false sense of efficacy. Like looking at a dating app and thinking you could date any or all those people: the reality is no you can't and you don't even know it.
So cheer up: life is still hard as f*ck.
Then why not just do the things you want to/can instead of the things you have to?
I am unemployed and surviving since last 4 years and being creative every day. In between I am also doing what I really want to do.
I have raised my bar really high to weed out the shitty employers and companies after 16 years in the industry and focus on what I want to do. I believe the money will just follow. It always has for me.
> Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Holy F. elephant in the room !
IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.
I genuinely think AI feels overblown and AI seems more like a feature.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...
I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!
Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?
I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.
On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.
This is how I feel too!
If you want to get excited… think about all the things that ever got you excited about the future. Then think about how you basically had to defer the possibility of them happening in your lifetime.
Readjust your timelines! Determine what is the most amazing thing that could happen, that you could contribute to, by orchestrating computation effectively.
I mean we don’t even have a cure for cancer yet!
Yes, but it's more because I haven't had substantial work in a long time and less about AI/ML specifically. Despite limitless info at our fingertips, tech interviewers have doubled-down on asking one to recite memorized facts point blank, which I was never great at as a generalist and now seems completely obsolete.
Sometimes. Have you ever played a single player game where there are achievements, goals, strategies to be had (...). You can often get addicted (eg Factorio) trying to optimize, make the best of your limited resources.
But then you realise you're spending too much time on it. And you just want to see the ending. So you enter the cheat codes to make it easy. You blast through everything, you get to the last levels and still easy. And things start feeling meaningless and pointless, and in fact, probably because of that, you quickly lose interest in the game completely.
It now feels like we're in the end game.
For hundreds of thousands of years we struggled with finding food, be it foraging or hunting, both of which requiring a lot of skill, dealing with several difficult diseases throughout adulthood, droughts, finding new places to stay for the night, for food.
And now... all we do is sit 8h per day in front of a screen, and everything else is taken care of. We can even have sex without having babies and a huge lifelong commitement. A first! The pleasures that it unlocks. We have food from all over the world at our fingertips. A feast no hunter-gatherer tribe would ever in their wildest dreams could even conceive of. We have cameras streaming animals from all over the world, lions killing impalas recorded being uploaded for the pleasure of people who watch it on youtube, or simply fledgling birds and their progress, we monitor the weather on all of Earth. We convert sunlight into thunder energy, and make thinking machines from rock. Truly, feels like the last levels of a game where we have the cheat codes.
A fish will rarely ask himself "what is water?". It just is. That's just how it is. So we also tend not to realise the ridiculousness of the world we live in because we have been born in it. Even more so younger generations. Some of us have seen the world rapidly changing at an increasingly faster pace. This all we have today is NOT normal. We live in the equivalent of a fraction of the blink of an eye to human existence.
Of course, we stress. A lot. Our mental health has never been worse. But this is feels like the end game. Our 'progressivism' and 'Libertarianism' led us to change a lot without thinking of the consequences. And here we are, reaching the finish line, unprepared. Our systems, laws, mental stability have no have time to adapt.
And it's scary. I hope we can pull it through.
On the contrary, only when we're an immortal, intergalactic species that has mastered the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe, there might be nothing left for us to do and you could make this complaint. Until then the number of challenges we have to overcome is basically infinite, and we finally have the powers needed to make any kind of meaningful progress on it.
There is the pesky little matter of jobs and paying rent and capitalism which will cause a lot of turmoil for a very long time, but once we get past that we have our work cut out for us.
"You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."
Doing what matters has become essential; discerning what that is, less clear.
I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.
I don't feel this way at all - and I'm in my late 40s. I'm excited about the future of technology, not only because of AI but also other opportunities next-gen GPUs and new power-efficient processors bring. RISC V. Cheap PCB manufacturing. Cheaper FPGAs and, perhaps, even homebrew ASICs. Much to be excited about.
And look around you - so much pain and suffering in the world. Lots and lots of problems to be solved, hopefully helped by all this technology.
Totally. I've learned a lot this year, but the knowledge feels shallow. I'm now mostly outcome-oriented, rather than focused on the journey.
That seems to be in your control to fix? I have been on this journey, but capitalism does not make it easy.
Might be tolerable if it would have given us fully automated utopia, but instead we get to watch the world burn and know nobody’s gonna do anything about it.
The thing you describe was perfectly addressed, as far as I can tell, in a piece of short fiction about AI that was written in 2021.
https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...
I have spoken to many professionals and looked at some companies usage. I can definitely tell we are in a bubble.
I noticed when a non-tech person tries to solve a problem with AI, they only tend to think in-terms on LLM. For e.g. even for a calculator app they use LLM for compute instead of direct calculation.
Sure they have managed to solve it. But they are remotely usable.
I have seen multiple failed projects taking these vibe coded ideas to production.
I wouldn't be disheartened and give up.
If AI was actually as good as the VCs and execs want you to believe, there would be tons of new and exciting things being created every day and new opportunities for everyone. There isn’t though, the one cool new technology is the coding agents themselves. But there’s no amazing software, no awesome new games or movies, no breakthrough medicine, no new foods or biotech, no fun electronics or gadgets. Coca Cola couldn’t even make a decent 1 minute commercial with gen AI and millions of dollars, it was just a random sequence of trains driving through snow. Where is the promised techno utopia? It’s all just slop. The malaise is from these VCs force feeding us all slop and telling us this is the future. I’m not saying current AI isn’t impressive or useful, I’m just saying it hasn’t really made anything better yet. I don’t think it’ll be that way forever though. I’m still long term bullish on AI, I just don’t think transformers are enough. We need something that enhances creativity and innovation, that improves quality, not just make it faster and cheaper to put together mediocre products.
I think things will turn around by the end of next year, but not before some major reckoning. There is a lot of motivated reasoning going on right now with trillions of dollars at stake where people aren’t being discerning and honest about what AI is actually capable of, and a lot of circular cash flow that’s making it seem more successful than it really is. I think when it really arrives, we’ll see a creative explosion that enriches our lives, where everything isn’t just cheaper to make at 80% of its former quality but actually better quality too. And I believe the solutions for improving quality will surface the things that human beings can uniquely do that AI can’t and give meaning back to our lives, but right now we’re in a shitty in between phase.
Thank you for asking this. I am in my 40s and have been working with computers and programming since my teens. I am considered as a good developer in my circle but have slowly started to lose my motivation.
Family, community, religion are pretty timeless and universal.
Maybe how medieval monks felt about the printing press. Even the guy bagging groceries can create books now!
See better.
Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.
Anyone can do it? Is everyone you know making a million dollars a year with their software startup? Are you?
Anyone with internet connection, a phone/laptop, and a few dollars to spare can create anything. Earlier it was not like this.
All of a sudden, your competition is anyone from anywhere in the world. Yes, to really make a million dollars, you need more than making the software. Even if you end up making a million dollars, you have 1000s of copy-cats from all parts of the world stealing your pie in no time. An average Joe will have tough time knowing which one is good and which ones to avoid.
I can relate to the cheats analogy. But there are still plenty of other games left to play.
I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.
Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!
Do something ai can't take from you.
I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.
idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.
Thank you for sharing. I hope your bug-hunting goes well.
Yes, but also no.
On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.
On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.
Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.
(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)
Find a hobby that'll scratch that creative itch. I recently got into woodworking and its been a blast! The Anarchist's Tool Chest might be right up your alley [1]. Christopher just released the revised edition a few days ago. There's a link in the description to a free pdf download.
On a similar note... the whole idea behind making your own furniture is similar to hand rolling code. You can go ahead and buy a dresser or bed at ikea and call it a day, but the quality is complete shit. Or you could build something that will last a life time and be praised for it's quality.
[1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-tool-chest
Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.
Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.
You don’t have to get paid to make contributions to math. There are still loads of hobbyists making contributions around the world. The guy that found the aperiodic monotile was a hobbyist who collaborated with a researcher. There was a significant proof in combinatorics (lower bound on superpermutations) contributed by an anonymous 4chan poster!
Hobbyist mathematics may long outlive a lot of research mathematics, and I think that’s okay. There’s nothing in the human spirit of inquiry that necessitates academia as an all-powerful institution. Heck, there have been a lot of problems with the institution in recent years, and those have everything to do with perverse incentives and nothing to do with AI.
there's still ego & competition against other humans which is what I do to distract myself
Euclid: "There is no royal road to geometry."
Ptolemy I: "I have this 'Royal Road' AI right here."
E: "Can it tell you the precise product of pi*e?"
P: "Piece of cake."
Sounds like you're burnt out. Maybe its time to touch some grass and think about what is really important and meaningful to you.
About 150 years ago, Nietzsche wrote
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
about the secularization of society. Perhaps something similar is happening to knowledge work now, but I think it was never a great idea to derive all your life's meaning from it anyway.
Not particularly because: the LLMs can code, but holy hell can they not operate or plan appropriately for ACTUALLY high stakes operational situations. When you absolutely cannot cause downtime, if you hand Fable/Sol/Kimi the reigns and say "do this 30 million token novel thing and absolutely don't screw up customer traffic" they'll blow it after the first compaction, every time.
This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.
Yep, everyone has forgotten the term "TCO", it seems
Find something that has meaning to you.
Ditto. I've started reading recently. The last time I seriously read a book was High School. It's rather enjoyable, and I have a newfound appreciation for public libraries.
If anyone hasn't read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams is absolutely hilarious.
It’s not unusual to feel this way right now. The world is arguably in an interesting state.
One thing to keep in mind is the world probably felt this way a few times as well. During the Vietnam War and the administration at the time probably made people feel powerless to do anything. 1930s crash. Lots of other examples like this.
AI certainly seems like a unique tipping point that reaches into all aspects of humanity. So, maybe it’s different this time.
make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.
Startups aren’t dead. Software businesses aren’t dead. 90% of the traditional buyers of software aren’t building and deploying their own apps from scratch. With a little thinking, creativity, and confidence, you too can make things and sell them for money in 2026.
No one will care because it's just another addition to the mountain of slop, and the guy bagging your groceries can do it.
Did the universe bestow on you some right to code better than the guy who bags your groceries? This whole post oozes a sense of wounded, bitter entitlement.
Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb.
Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.
I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!
As a backend/full-stack engineer I still receive at least a few linkedin recruiter messages a week.
curious how long have you been in the field? Ive been wondering if it's my age or my LinkedIn algorithm changed for the worse in February once I updated it. I hadnt updated it in many years previously.
I am not the one who posted before. But try this to maximize LinkedIn.
Consciously, "Like" job posts. That is, in the feed section of linkedin, "like" any type of jobs that you see others post. Linkedin will show you more job posts in your feed, which others post. You "like" that too. Then it will show more job postings. Keep liking that too from your feed. But don't like or view or read any other posts while you do this. Not even your friends/partner's posts.
Do this at least 3-4 times a day, with 5-10 likes in each batch.
In a week's time, Linkedin will flood your feed with job posts from actual users. Now you become selective and like only design/web developer posts that your skills align with. Then it will bring more of it and you might be able to find something.
There are two things that happens. Recruiters/hiring managers see that you liked their post, so they check your profile. Keep it updated. Your profile visits will also go up. Linkedin sees that your profile is viewed by more recruiters, and your profile will be shown above other profiles when recruiters search using their tool.
I hope you get a job soon, and you can thank me later!
Thank you but from 2012 to Jan. 2026 I only used LInkedIn when a recruiter sent me a message about a UX Research/Design and or Developer job they were trying to fill. I would get about a handful of these messages every month for all those years.
I like being in demand and not have to chase or be in a massive pile of others vying for a job. Hence why i am getting into mid level medical jobs where there is a large shortage of these types of workers. Yet, it's less pay and more stress but stability, I get to help people and with a shortage of workers I should be able to boost my pay as I did in tech.
I'm in a shitty place for working as a dev, and I still get recruiters knocking. What they're offering is not great, but that's because the market here is shit. At least there's something!