Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me

>> They don't give you healthcare, do you think they will give you CASH like that???

Here is a tip: take no platitudes, and change your life in a way that works around your worst fears. The healthcare bit you can solve by emigrating to a country with free healthcare, for example. If you have money for a deposit in the place where "rent is sky high," maybe you should consider a different place to live, maybe even a rural location.

Nobody really knows how things are going to develop. But if our brains have gotten us this far, maybe our brains will get us out of a potential future crisis caused by AIs. Just hedge your risks.

Being absolutely serious, I think you may be having a mental health crisis. You describe burnout, feelings of unreality, deep seated anxiety about both the present and the future, as well as a lack of enjoyment in things which you imply you liked before.

I'm not a doctor, but I've suffered with mental health issues in the past. You strike me as someone in the midst of clinical depression and anxiety, and (relating to the idea that nothing is real in particular) like you might have early signs of psychosis.

Please get help. It is not the big deal you think it is: SSRIs, therapy, and lifestyle changes (relax a bit!) will help you see this. Things will be OK, but you're clearly struggling right now. Making a post here was a good idea, but now it is time to take stock and consult a professional or two.

Good luck, and look after yourself.

Whenever you feel this kind of panic you should ask yourself how F’d you are relative to the general population. AI will shake things up for sure, but has it ever been the case that smart, educated, experienced people collectively got hurt because of innovation or disruption? No, never.

Your total comp might go down or it might go up. Every time you make a career move that’s the risk you take. But if you’re healthy and smart and diligent enough to be highly paid today you are in a better position than 95% of your countrymen and 99.9% of the rest of the world, no matter what happens.

Enjoy the time you have on this planet. Don’t let fear of the unknown get in the way of that.

Draw salary as long as you can, save as much as possible and buy land outright somewhere cheap. No mortgage. I saw where it was all headed back in the early 2000s. I was in my mid 30s and feeling the grind back then.

Rent? Fuck that. Your life is on the line and this is for all the marbles. You find a way to go rent free. Maybe do like the bums are doing all over the place, live in a van, etc. Nobody seems to care. Save that money and then get out.

I did this, ending my career in IT back in 2006. Best move ever. When they fired everyone on the last contract I was on, I can't tell how good it felt.

By the way, the house I lived in at the end... Remember the house in Fight Club? That would have been an improvement.

It's one of those things where it could go either way: worst-case scenario, your fears and worries become reality and most web-stuff will be outsourced to AI handlers/managers and the actual AIs doing the work. Best-case scenario? AI ends up not replacing dev jobs but turns into a hyper-powerful toolkit for them.

Even if you take AI aside, it remains a fact that nothing will ever stay as it is, things will always move, the world around you will always change (we get older, everything gets re-evaluated constantly as we age). I thought we'd reached the ultimate end-goal with Turbo Pascal, then, Borland Delphi — why use anything else, ever? This is not a particular fault of the AI era, it's just one that hits you and your profession a bit closer. The exact same thing happened to SO MANY OTHER PROFESSIONS over the years.

There was an article a long while back about a US law firm that decided to try and outsource a huge case by shipping tons of boxes to a specifically-trained "warehouse" of workers in the Philippines, knowing that their law (and capability to speak/read/understand English) is similar enough to that of the US. And, from what I recall, it turned out that while this was a fantastic business decision which saved them a lot of money by managing to outsource the most expensive part of the those huge cases, it also became clear that "being a lawyer" may have lost its long-held prosperous perspective (at the bottom).

I say this because that article was written over a decade ago (if I remember correctly), and even today, law-schools are still packed, lawyers are still making a lot of money, everything is still... sorta fine (for them).

You will NOT live forever. So the question is only if you can sustain your career long enough to make it through and then enjoy your ACTUAL LIFE once you're reasonable safe, financially. I am very, very confident that you will be able to do that, even with the rise of AI.

I look at all the mid-to-large-scale projects I've been involved with, as a developer, and 80% of the real work is figuring out how to approach certain things, and how everything should tie together. Writing the code itself was never the problem. Never. For AI to take over completely (aside from writing certain functions or boilerplate starters), I'd argue we've still got a very long way to go.