241–250 of 402 posts
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I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.
Keep going? Just because there’s a different way to do what you like doing doesn’t mean you should stop. Or become a carpenter. The world is going to be flooded by them.
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change. But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear. AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actua…
What does this word salad mean?
People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority
The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.”
So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself.
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“Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.”
Historically, this always happens.
Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort.
Each time, people initially interpret it as:
the skill is dying
But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance.
Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility
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“But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.”
This rejects the common fear narrative.
The activities persist, what changes is why they matter.
You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement.
The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist.
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“AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.”
This is the core claim.
Old model:
effort → output → value
New model:
judgment → outcome → value
Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity.
Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact
Not:
Did you make something?
But:
Did reality change because you were involved?
You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention.
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“The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.”
So the post ends optimistic.
AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting.
Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world.
Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly.
Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect).
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In one sentence
The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.
The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults. I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline. Thank you for sharing your inspiring exa…
>I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics. This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.
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The problem though is that relationships with others are risky. When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. Even if I could reproduce by budding, this is not an envi…
The world is always full of danger. This moment in time is exceptional only in the form of that danger, not in its substance. When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce. Food for thought.
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One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
I am trying to think of it like hand tools vs power tools. As long as I work in construction, I'll have to use power tools. Maybe one day I'll support myself by making fine furniture. I'd like that.
These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do…
> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of…
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Yeah, everyone I know who doesn’t have a child/not planning to have zero connection to Reddit or anything online. Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays. And as they watch other going child free or 1-2 children, they realize that life is possible nowadays.
"Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays" Do they? Or have most just become too distorted to feel allright filling their emptiness with empty online debates and netflix? I know people who are really happy without kids (and who will never have them), but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade. And with many, there isn't even a facade.
I haven't asked "why should I even try" in ages. The question "how do I even manage this hell" has been on my mind more often.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year. Then I…
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement jus…
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
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This analogy falls flat because a) Carpentry already happens in the real world b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture). Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focuse…
Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with i…
I do both carpentry and programming and both activities have long since become repetitive. There are only so many dovetails or distributed systems you can make.
That’s why I don’t care if AI can replace those parts. I’m in it to do the designing, not the crafting.