A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

I strictly avoid allowing AI to change the level of abstraction I program in. Defining and orchestrating the architecture of an application is the most fun part anyway — quite apart from being the most important when others are touching your code, whether meat bags or LLMs.

That's not to say that there aren't problems in this world and that some gnashing of teeth isn't warranted - there really are issues, even with AI, but the malcontents have never been louder in my life. Outside of tech in the rest of society, many people haven't realized that the world has basically broken since 2016 and a lot of people are finally mourning the revolution in politics that we've lived through too. It really hasn't hit how tumultuous the last decade has been for most people yet.

I was "fortunate" in that I went through a life altering tragedy about that time so I got a little bit of perspective about how replaceable I was a bit before all these guys did. I realized how short life was, and how messed up things can get and how "the system" doesn't give a rats ass about you if you can't produce. I learned that viscerally, so perhaps to my detriment, I'm like the guy in the meme, "first time?" But these doomers and ai-haters and malcontents are mourning I think. In order to feel important and special again they rail against their replacement. I get it, I am still mourning the death of my old career. Some of these guys are realizing that they can be outdone by a machine for the first time in their lives. White collar worker types who thought "knowledge work" was safe and uniquely human are mourning at their own new found mediocrity. They say they can "do it better!" and maybe they can, but that doesn't matter - they're realizing that "doing it better" is not what is required. The people who don't want to use the new tools will be like people opposing the steam engine. They may not remember that John Henry died trying to beat the steam engine - I think that's the part they may have forgotten.

No, the loud irritation and frustration is a blend of a lot of things in my mind. But largely, what I see is a bunch of people who thought they were special and smart and unreplaceable are realizing that they're just as replaceable as the rest of people. They're mourning. Marxists call this alienation if I remember my Marx.

It's a very tiny project, but I dived straight into a new project in a new language completely by hand this month, precisely because I'm miserable and exhausted from my job requiring me to drive a bullshit machine instead of solving problems by thinking.

Getting a few minutes in the evening to actually program, and learn new things as I do it, has been crucial to maintaining any sanity at all in this brave new world of unending heaps of slop.

2. AI allows people to 10x things. If your organization has a healthy engineering culture then I assume people don't send for review shit like "change constant into hardcoded value" and AI-generated PRs are checked to fit the broader design, but if your organization was already full of idiots, then they produce 10x the output. Good luck trying to survive that.