I have a different perspective. Most of the world is software. The US Constitution is software. Companies are software. With AI, we can build so much more software, its incredible! How these systems are architected are complicated. Sure, if you really loved coding at an extreme low level, that may go away. But I think there is 10x more software engineering going on my company (and in my personal life). Things change, but things are more fun than ever.
Feeling Sad about AI
111–120 of 285 posts
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Look at me, I collected a single data point, I am so SMRT. Fooled U suckers!" Please at least attempt to have a big more rigor in your standards.
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You are retired and sound like a conservative who soon be cheering on Universal Basic Income "if," you follow and agree with everything the president says.
As you can see in June he says he's met with the Ai overlords about giving out free money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7lQEpKzVY4 Then two months later he is banging the drum about highly unpopular data centers & now he wants to give free 5k checks away for voting red (lol). The natural progression of what the Ai overlords have champion for a decade is what he will champion next too Universal Basic Income (aka welfare checks) because the overlords see the future and have sold the president on it too!
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this: When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treate…
This is what I keep saying to my youngest, who wants to do games. Go to any bank or insurance company or web agency or to a FAANG company etc and you find rooms full of people who got into programming because they wanted to write games. And then realized what a trap that is and how much more money they could get out of just doing the same programming work but for far more "boring" ends. Same as working for a non-prof…
There's a reason garbage collectors get paid so well.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#114This is basically me in 2026. Life has no meaning and I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it. Hopefully I can find a job that doesn't bore me but I'm not positive.
No. Please don't think that way. I don't know how to reach you personally, but please take a look at this article: https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/suicidal-tho...
I pray it helps you.
We're much more than any economic system. The sun still shines. There's a lot out in the world to see.
Even in the worst case scenario, that we're all jobless. There are mountains to explore. Beaches to walk. Forests to camp in.
I don't know where this all is headed. But, I do know each human has value. Your value is far greater than any job, skill, or the number of green pieces of paper you have.
Feel free to reach out to me directly.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#115My son told me yesterday he wants to program video games for a living. He's 13. He's looking at how it used to be done and seeing the pride people had in doing it. He hasn't seen how it is now. Not sure I have the heart to tell him how terrible the industry has become. Feels like telling a kid 30 years ago that being an astronaut is pointless because they no longer go to the moon.
If you haven’t already… show him how to use codex or claude or whatever. And let him start having fun and making games.
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Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#116This points to the bigger issue of people tying their value and identity to their livelihood. There is way too much clout, ego and identity chasing going on in all informational fields. If you instead identified as a parent, as a hobbyist programmer, as a rock climber, as a learner, as a meditator, in essence as anything that is not directly tied to your occupation, you don't have anything to worry or be sad about. T…
Funny enough, it was what programming had turned into just before the onset of rapid AI adoption that drove me to find my identity and meaning outside of the hobby and work. It took me a long time! I'm only now feeling more confident about it and it's been years. Definitely worthwhile though.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#117This person is responding sensibly. I wish him well.
What remains to be done is to accept that change has come, and take part in shaping the future.
As for programming I am getting more done than ever before; I just outsource the implementation. Honestly I feel like I'm flying. I understand the poster felt that the implementation was the part he enjoyed. Experts are still needed to use AI for coding well; a PM isn't going to get the same mileage as he is, so take comfort in that.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#118I feel the opposite of sad, I am very very excited. I love programming and I love technology, but the stuff I'm doing now is beyond what I could not do on my own, and now I'm spending a few hours building complete end-to-end stuff. This is the golden age for builders. I created a fully working house simulator, I made a math test creator for my kids, I fixed up some other side projects that I had and added observabili…
This is exactly how I feel. I can roughly understand why people feel sad, but I cannot relate. I feel more capable than ever before and am simply excited. LLMs have been a great learned tool for me especially to venture into new programming domains in my personal projects.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#119I did well in school and the praise I received for excelling in my math degree did shape my life and impact my motivations. I do like praise. But outside of social reasons, it's understanding I crave. Thoroughly understanding a topic is awesome. I remember the feeling of acing my qualifier exam in grad school. Those LLMs change nothing fundamentally about this motivation and need and capability. I can't type a prompt…
This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it. I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out. AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.
AI providers are in fact incentivized to have you not think about the task. I’ve found that they automatically do more for you, and frankly, a lot of the time I don’t want it to do more for me. Ask me a question rather than burning a bunch of tokens to answer something I already know of the top of my head.
Re: Feeling Sad about AI
#120I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…
The web developer who wrote some early parts of Django and has reserved the top comment spot tells us to surrender to the inevitability.
There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
This is defeatist propaganda.