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My five stages of AI grief

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21–30 of 38 posts

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#21

> Writing code isn't where I bring the most value. Understanding business problems, analyzing trade-offs, and making sure we're building the right things is where I can put all those years to good use. It might sound like an obvious thing, but it took me a while to get to this point. Reaching this epiphany is a major milestone in the career of an SE even before the days of LLMs. That's basically the crux of it.

The vast majority of developers are not in roles where decisions at that level are being made (except occasionally, on a smaller scope), so their ability in that context is irrelevant. You're describing project leads and department leads.

Every engineer has this opportunity, whether they use it or not is usually the issue. Almost every decision that you make can make the current and future success of the business more or less likely.

I've said before: "There are no 'staff' projects, only 'staff' execution."

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#22

Many HN commentators went through the same thing over the last 3 years. You'd find plenty of skeptics in 2023 and 2024 comments. First half of 2025 was the anger stage. Later half of 2025 was full on bargaining stage when models like GPT5.2 and Opus 4.5 were released. In 2026, people are in depression stage. I don't think most devs will go into acceptance stage until later this year when Blackwell-class models come o…

> I don't think most devs will go into acceptance stage until later this year when Blackwell-class models come online and AI undeniably write better code than vast majority of humans. I'm pretty sure GPT5.2 and Opus 4.5 were only trained on H200-class chips.

We can only hope! It's about time all those pompous developers embrace the economic rug-pull, and adopt a lifestyle more in line with their true economic value. It's capitalism people, the best system there is. Deal with it and quit whining.

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: The comment I am replying to was rewritten completely, and originally asserted that the quality of LLMs was now undeniable. "Undeniably"? I will deny that they are good. I try to use LLMs on a near-daily basis and find them unbearably frustrating to use. They cannot even adequately complete instructions like "following the pattern of A, B, and C in the existing code, create X Y and Z functions but with one chan…

The problems with your take (and others like it) are manyfold. First, there are some "smells" that I noticed. You say that LLMs hallucinate APIs and in another comment (brief skim of your history to make sure it's worth replying) you say something about chatting with an LLM. If you're "using" them in a chat interface, that's already 1+year old tech, and you should know that noone here talks about that. We're talking…

I use the chat interface by default because it is the only way I have felt that I am gaining any productivity at all. Letting LLMs waste time probing for files and executing their atrocities on my codebase has only resulted in lost time. Not for lack of trying; I have set up Codex and Claude Code environments, multiple times. I have wasted entire days trying to configure the setup and get something that provides value to me, three times last year - once with an early release of CC, once with Codex's release, and once again to retry them with GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5.Every attempt ended in a complete failure to justify the time invested.

> The third problem that I see is that you are "fighting" other deamons, instead of working with people that want to contribute. You bring up hypebots, you bring up AGI, unkept promises and so on. But we, the people here, haven't promised you anything. We're not the ones hyping up agi asi mgi and so on. If you want to learn something, it would be more productive to keep those discussions separate. If your fight is with the hyperbots, fight them on those topics, not here. Or, honestly, don't waste your time. But you do you.

This very thread is about hype. The post I originally replied to suggests that developers are in stages of grief about LLMs. That we are traversing denial, anger, and depression, before our inevitable acceptance. It is utterly tiring to be subjected to this day in, day out, in every avenue of public discourse about the field. Of course I have grievances with the hype. Of course I don't appreciate being told I'm in denial and that everything has changed. The only thing that has changed is that LLM-generated articles are all over HN and ShowHN is polluted with a very high quantity of very low quality content.

> Second, the overall problem with "it doesn't work for me" is that it's an useless signal.

The signal is not for the true believers. People who have not succumbed to the hype may find value in knowing that they are not alone. If one person can't make use of LLMs, while everyone around them is hyping them up, it may make that person feel like they are being doing something wrong and being left behind. But if people push back against the hype, they will know that they are not alone, and that maybe it isn't actually worth investing entire workdays into trying to find the magical configuration of .md files that turns Claude Code from 0.5x productivity to 10x productivity.

To be clear, I'm not really in the market for advice on "holding it right". If I find myself being left behind in reality, I will continue giving the tooling another shot until I get it right. I spend most of my life coding, and have so many ambitious projects I wish to bring into the world and not enough time to do them all; I will relentlessly pursue a productivity increase if and when it becomes available. As it is, though, I have seen zero evidence that I am actually being left behind, and am not currently interested in trying again at the present time.

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#25
post #6

Many HN commentators went through the same thing over the last 3 years. You'd find plenty of skeptics in 2023 and 2024 comments. First half of 2025 was the anger stage. Later half of 2025 was full on bargaining stage when models like GPT5.2 and Opus 4.5 were released. In 2026, people are in depression stage. I don't think most devs will go into acceptance stage until later this year when Blackwell-class models come o…

I must be using it wrong then or using the wrong languages. All I have seen it produce so far was mediocre at best and painfully wrong 2-3 prompts in. Not even starting with how it just “fixes” a hug by introducing a wholly new one and then re-introducing the old one when pointing it out.

Obligatory but important: which model, application, and programming language was this in?

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#26

Many HN commentators went through the same thing over the last 3 years. You'd find plenty of skeptics in 2023 and 2024 comments. First half of 2025 was the anger stage. Later half of 2025 was full on bargaining stage when models like GPT5.2 and Opus 4.5 were released. In 2026, people are in depression stage. I don't think most devs will go into acceptance stage until later this year when Blackwell-class models come o…

I'd really like to not see a post that is essentially "u mad" on HN. You can simply disagree with people.

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a concrete example of where Opus 4.5 disappointed you? Maybe a Github repo for me to try?

As you can see from the username, this is an anonymous account where I speak freely without concern of it being associated with me or my projects in perpetuity. I will extend the same question to you, though, as I have offered to every person I engage with on this subject on HN: what is your 10x project? Have you produced any software that other people would consider using[1]? I have yet to be shown a single project…

[dead]

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#28
post #3

If the only way to advance my career was to talk into a chatbox that makes shit up and encourages people to kill themselves i would stop using computers to spend my days picking oranges. i guess some people feel differently.

Anger stage

no, i simply have a job that requires me to be good at it. tenths of a millisecond matter. every bit in a structure is carefully considered.

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#29

Is there any non-pro-AI position that couldn’t be construed as being part of a stage of grief?

No. Bringing up stages of grief in a debate (rather than an account of personal experience, like in the post) is an argument-killer, because any negative response from the alleged grieving side is instantly taken down by smugly categorizing their negativity as a stage of grief. It's not just reserved to LLM arguments too, this is a common wrapper for the less dignified "you disagree with me which proves I'm right" position.

Re: My five stages of AI grief

#30
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anger stage

no, i simply have a job that requires me to be good at it. tenths of a millisecond matter. every bit in a structure is carefully considered.

Makes sense. Sounds like HFT or embedded/RTOS stuff? I don't know for sure, but I have to imagine coding agents aren't terribly helpful in those domains.
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