Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me

My partner and I often discuss that if civilisation collapses there will still be work to be done. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for people to do more jobs offline. It might even be healthy in the end, though obviously there will be a lot of devastation. Sometimes you have to scrap things and start over with better foundations. I can only pray that some of these efforts can be put into the real world problems that are surmounting of late, such as rewilding, etc. but being a dreamer keeps my sanity. :)

Back when personal technical blogging was a thing, I produced a lot of valuable content for myself and my employer. It was valuable in a sense that it was read, and positioned us as expert in the field, which lead directly to sales. Now, companies are expected to produce content on, say, linked-in, in order to get clicks - just to be seen to be an active company. What is produced now is mostly PR fluff that is written by people that are so distanced from the technology, that it is essentially meaningless. We had a young 'social media content' person that quit after seeing ChatGPT. On reflection, they were right. Producing meaningless marketing content and 'organics' and liking stuff to get likes back is something that an AI can do. ChatGPT can produce '100 words on innovative AR Product that is going to change business' as much as a meatbot can.

As per my anecdata above, if you are working in field where the value that you add is pretty low. You can get replaced by ChatGPT quite easily. In some ways cookie-cutter web development is like that. If your job can be outsourced to cheap and less experienced (in terms of domain knowledge) people, it can be 'outsourced' to ChatGPT. Do hard stuff. Not hard as in you are able to buidl a web page with this weeks' new framework, but hard as in solving a problem that other people cannot. If other people can't solve the problem, it doesn't matter if you're competing with an AIbot or a meatbot.

I’m amazed at the number of people responding to this and answering the question they want to answer, not the question the OP is asking.

> It just feels like anyone could do it.

This.

Yes, you’re 100% right. No, AI will not take away all the jobs, that’s not going to happen, but no one thinks it’s going to happen, anyone calling that out and saying… “don’t worry! AI is just a tool…” are beating a strawman.

The reality is that doing difficult highly paid work will become significantly eaiser and a much wider pool of people will be able to apply to do jobs that previously only people demanding significantly higher wages were able to actually do.

…and that will mean, a surplus of people wanting jobs, to the delight of large businesses who will use it as an (entirely reasonable) excuse to choose to employ cheaper workers.

Flat fact: 20 year of experience and a college degree mean nothing if someone can do the same job for 60% of the pay, and there are 1) people who will accept that and 2) the technology will increasingly enable this scenario.

Certainly, other roles will appear in other areas, but face the blunt reality: the days of scarcity based high wage roles for programmers such as there are today is numbered.

If you want to maintain your income and level, you probably need to start looking around for ways of doing that now, before there are 60 people applying to do your job on Fiverr.

If you stand still, you are correct, you’re basically screwed.

…but, you don’t have to stand still.

Remember, you are better than the majority of the people who will be able to do your current job in the future using AI. That’s why you have your job now.

Lean into it with your professional development to make yourself better than you are now using the tools.

That seems like the only really sensible advice I’ve seen recently.

Time for you to enter consulting!

Your services will be even more valuable in assisting others who are completely dependent on whatever form of AI is doing the programming.