Ask HN: How to Deal with AI Anxiety?

I'm over 10 years into my career as developer in mid-thirties, and starting a family. I'd say my mental health has been quite stable until now. I've never understood people who earn good money solving problems with computers who've said that their jobs are meaningless and feel depressed because of this. I love it, even if my job (at least current job) is not changing the world or even improving it, it feels create creating products that are useful and provide me with a challenge. If I didn't have to work, I'd still working on some of the open source projects that I currently don't have enough time for.

Honestly, the release and proliferation of ChatGPT feels like the worst news to me as a developer. Not perhaps in its current iteration, but who knows what the future holds. But every piece of news regarding these advances in AI has had me on edge...

It has left me feeling like software development is kind of a pointless skill or rather something that will be commoditized soon, unless you are heavily-specialized in some field which I unfortunately am not.

I guess I wouldn't care as much if I was financially independent, humans still play chess despite AI being better at it, and I would build stuff. But since I will soon have another human being that is dependent on me, it is pretty disheartening to not be able to provide for it with my useless skill set that I have taken over a decade to develop. It's funny that every other career seems safer to me at this point since most other professions rely on certification rather than merit. Something like doctor or lawyer feels like it would much better chance of being AI-proof.

I don't quite know how to deal with this anxiety. The only thing I can think of is trying to maximize my income as much as I can try to invest as much of it as possible. Or perhaps acquire some trades skills as these seem much more AI-proof at this point. Or get into a more specialized of software engineering that requires more skill (which is of course not that easy!)

What are your thoughts?

>Something like doctor or lawyer feels like it would much better chance of being AI-proof.

For variety of reasons someone might prefer a person performing medical operations, giving legal advices, or designing software.

I've been handling my own AI anxiety by trying to understand what these tools are, what they can do, and what they can't do. It turns out that they are a lot more limited than you'd expect and code generated by the AI is almost always going to require manual human intervention before it can be thrown into production.

Now on the other hand I just pivoted from development/SRE into marketing...

Ask ChatGPT. :-)

I have a very strong hunch that AI-assisted programming is going to make experienced software developers even more valuable.

ChatGPT makes basic programming available to a lot more people - it flattens that learning curve on getting some code that works.

There is a LOT more to building useful systems than just writing the code:

- Deciding what needs to be built, which incorporates understanding what users need and what is possible to build with existing tools

- Iterating on exploratory prototypes to help nail down those requirements

- Thinking through edge-cases

- Confirming that the code we are writing actually does what it's meant to do

LLM assistance means we can do a lot more of this kind of work, because we can spend less of our time on the typing-code-into-a-computer step. I'm seeing the benefits of that in my own work already.

If you give tools like ChatGPT to a programmer AND to a non-programmer, the programmer will still out-perform the non-programmer by a significant margin.

My recommendation is to focus on learning how to become an LLM-augmented programmer. You + ChatGPT should be massively more effective than random non-programmer + ChatGPT.

I'm really excited about this, because I'm finding it opens up a whole new world of software development opportunities to me that previously were too hard for me to take on. I'd be happy to try my hand at Android or iOS development today with LLM-assistance, for example - where previously I would have avoided them because I can't afford the 3-6 month ramp-up time that's needed to get me to a point where I can be productive.

I'd go as far as saying that experienced software developers are the group that are best equipped to really take advantage of this new technology. We can really fly with this stuff!