Fuck it, make it anyway

I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI.

Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems.

Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective.

But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.

Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it.

I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.

How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?

Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.

As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.

I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.

What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?

Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?

There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.

Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.

I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.

Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.

I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.

We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.

If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.

Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.

I would refute that since it's obvious (using a strong word here), that digital anything in the classroom is really bad[0] and consistently led to lower PISA scores. Perhaps there will be some initial changes in the wrong direction with more digitalization but eventually common sense is going to prevail. And concerned mom groups are incredibly powerful these days. Parents are going to freak out the moment a recording AI (or an androgenous teaching robot) is going to be introduced in the classroom.

[0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/

I find that Camp B is a lot more likely to not understand Camp A than the other way around. Both enjoy the outcome of "we made something cool", but Camp A more heavily values the journey to get there, and many in that camp aren't particularly bothered if they didn't actually get there if the journey was good. Camp B was never interested in the journey but absolutely wants an outcome. Unfortunately, the voices of Camp B seem a lot louder, and Camp A can come off like old farts.

The thing about your analogy is that the person in Camp B might seem a bit silly to most people at face value. Even your average person values doing a bit more than sticking to the parking lot in a beautiful national park they may not visit again for decades. The reason I bring this up is that I personally don't begrudge Camp B. How can I not sympathize with people who want to shape reality to their imagination? I understand that.

Where I divorce from Camp B is on the idea that the process behind developing the architecture and the code software is inherently a roadblock and essentially has no value. They produce these specious claims like "code was never the hard part" because they view code as something completely separate from the thing the code produces, which was simply not true because the very nature of code is in describing the thing that it's implementing. The typical Camp B mindset seems to misunderstand or hate this fact of reality, and many of them don't even seem to get that other human minds have other perfectly valid objectives behind the things that they do. There is nothing wrong with becoming a programmer because you enjoy and thrive in the process in writing software, but even before LLMs, we have been increasingly infantilizing that desire because it's not seen as productive or obviously revenue producing. Valuing the process is viewed by outsiders as dilly-dallying when, in actuality, many of the greatest things in not just computer programming but technology and science have been a result of Camp A people investing effort in exploring and executing theory that Camp B has no interest in.

This is why I get pissed off when I hear that "code was never the hard part." It's like, screw you people, my job being paid to write code to satisfy the requirements of my employer/customer was and is hard. What's changed are the requirements; the new requirements are to not give a fuck about quality and sustainability and to maximize speed at which boxes can be ticked for project management. This doesn't mean that making software that's not a piece of shit isn't still a hard problem. There's a dearth of projects built with AI in the last 3 years, the vast majority of which are polished turds that have been completely abandoned by their authors. What does that tell you?

Camp B should, by all means, go ahead and do their thing. I think it's great that technology has made it possible for someone to build an app or a site with no background knowledge or hiring of contractors. What they don't deserve is disrespect Camp A and talk down to them because they find programming to be a nuisance.

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