This reasoning is solid and applies equally to AI. I do not need it crammed into every service and forced on me thank you very much "If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours."
I'm OK being left behind, thanks
421–430 of 800 posts
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm encouraging my folks to try it pretty hard because A) I've personally seen the productivity gains and B) using it is at first deeply weird/uncomfortable. Sometimes you've got to convince people to push through that kind of thing.
How you objectively measuring success? 93% of Developers Use AI Coding Tools. Productivity Hasn't Moved. - https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi... - March 4th, 2026
They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#423“There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?” This is a great framing.
I'm less convinced.
To keep and/or increase my current compensation, I have to be competitive in the software development market.
(Whether I need AI to remain competitive is another matter.)
The 16,000 new babies will be competing in different markets.
Oh, and of those 16,000 babies, many are born in far less fortunate circumstances, they're already far behind their cohort. :/
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing) > There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowi…
The counterpoint is that you will learn jank. If you started early webdev, you learned lots of tricks, that dont benefit a modern webdev. E.g soap, long polling, the JsonP workaround... and so on Many of the Llm frameworks will be seen simular. Mcp is already kinda heading in the obsolete direction imo, as skills took over
I’ve learned a lot of stuff that don’t really benefits me right now, but now and then I encounter a situation that made me happy that I did. It may never happens for some, but at the time, I was probably happy learning it.
But there’s some stuff that I don’t bother explore in depth because my time is finite and I don’t really need it. And anything LLM tooling is probably easier than a random JS framework. Vim’s documentation is probably longer than cursor’s.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#425This is one of those posts I would like look back on in a year or two. I am usually a late adopter with everything. This time is think its different. I am seeing what AI can do with my own eyes. I am creating new things at light speed and figuring out this all works. I don't think you want to be late to the party on this one.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#426> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…
"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you.
Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.
If you started today, you'd simply learn the hard way, as it's always been done: get a few books or register for a course. Carve some time every day for theory and practice. All the while prioritizing what matters the most to get stuff done quickly right now, with little fluff. You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. That applies to abstractions, frameworks, and tooling, but also to the fundamentals. You'll probably learn ES6+ and TS, not JS WAT. A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.
This is true for all tech. If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#427One hidden premise of this is "AI tools are not useful now, even if they might be in the future." For example: > Few are useful to me as they are now. Except current AI tools are extremely useful and I think you're missing something if you don't see that. This is one of the main differences between LLMs and cryptocurrency; cryptocurrencies were the "next big thing", always promising more utility down the road. Wherea…
Cool. But every time I use them I get a wrong answer faster.
I know, I know. I'm prompting it wrong. I'm using the wrong model. I need to pull the slot-machine arm just one more time.
I know I'm not as clever as Terrance Tao - so I'll wait until the machines are useful to someone like me.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.
I think looking at what the web did to the journalism industry as a model to what's happening to the software dev industry is worth while. Journalism didn't go away but it did completely change. Many old school journalists just couldn't adapt and left the industry, many papers died too.
Many things only have value because of scarcity.
Digital products such as "photoshop" have had value because people need a tool like that and there's only a limited number of competition, i.e. scarcity. The scarcity exists because of the cost. I.e. the cost of creating "photoshop"creates limit for how many "photoshops" exist. When you bring down the cost you'll have more "photoshops" when you have more "photoshops" as the volume increases the value decreases. Imagine if you can just tell claude "write me photoshop", go take a dump and come back 30 mins later to a running photoshop. You wouldn't now pay 200USD for a license, now would you? You'd pay 0USD.
If you now create a tool that can (or promises it) can obliterate the costs, it means essentially anyone can produce "photoshop". And when anyone can do it it will be done over and over and at which point they're worth zero and you can't give them away.
The same thing has happened to media publishing, print media -> web, computer games etc.
Then the problem is that when your product is worth zero you can no longer make a business by creating your product, so in order to survive you must look into alternative revenue streams such as ads, data mining etc. None of which are a benefit to to the product itself.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#429If this is about vibe-coding. I remember when React was the hotness and I was still using jQuery, I didn't learn it immediatley, maybe a couple years later is when I finally started to use React. I believe this delayed my chance in getting a job especially around that time when hiring was good eg. 2016 or so. With vibe-coding it just sucks the joy out of it. I can't feel happy if I can just say "make this" and it com…
It's funny too you'll hear people say they reverse-engineered something (not related to today's post) and you're like "wow that's impressive" but it turns out AI did it.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the bigger issue is not that LLMs are taking away developer jobs, but the current geopolitical crisis (the collapse of the US empire and the end of the neoliberal era) is leading towards an imminent economic catastrophe, and that would be enough to pop not only the AI bubble, but an even bigger "IT bubble" that has been proliferating since the 90s. Programmers (and other white collar jobs) were able to luxuri…
I would say if all of your doomastrophizing comes to light (the myriad of collapses and depressions and winters in your post), then there is no opportunity for anyone anywhere, and we should all stock up on bullets and cigarettes while we can. But something tells me you won't do that.
Yup, absolutely! People before us already lived through the Great Depression, people already lived through two World Wars, and despite all that there were still some technological advancements made and some good opportunities amongst the chaos! There's obviously going to be pains from transitioning into a new world order, but humanity will still keep on living. Just don't expect the next world to be the same as before!
I think it's important to know and practice your passion, even if you have to work on something different to pay the bills. You can only be good at something if you really like it, and you never know what opportunity you'll stumble onto if you're ready for it.