I don’t have an answer, but sometimes it helps to know that you are not alone. I have almost two decades of experience, and despite people saying stuff along the lines of “we heard that our profession is dead many times, and it’s still fine”, I have never been so lost and depressed in my career ever before.

I understand that I’m in a privileged position as a SWE, and that maybe I have been overpaid for the majority of my career, but the swing is so sharp that it really hits me in the gut badly.

The same thing that may threaten jobs is also the thing I'm using to build new things. I'm trying to focus on opportunities that are still under AI's attention.

Tech was always evolving, from on prem and in house infra, then virtualization, then cloud, then containers, then distributed systems at scale, then managed and serverless infra. Change was already constant, just slower and easier to adapt to. AI feels different because it's moving faster than people and companies can adapt, and the productivity gains are still unstructured.

I think the only way to cope is to focus on what leverage it gives you (I try to see all these AI things coming out, with a curious mindset and immediately try to think what and where I can use this), not only what it may take away.

But yes hitting the low is also a part of it. I feel useless sometimes but then I remember 'I get to tell AI what needs to done'

I don't have any solid advice here but try to build something using AI and ship it, even if no one uses it, you'll get to learn a lot. I'm still learning.

focus on your paycheck, it's the one single thing you take home with you, not the "whatever you are building this week". Then save some for the winter days to come, and spend the rest on your vices and pleasures. It's my sure cure for work-related depression

I've been concerned about AI safety for about two decades now. Given my age I genuinely think the most likely way I will die will be from AI either directly or indirectly as a result of it being created.

I had a nightmare last night where a tyrannical AI was hunting me down and I knew there was nothing I could do because it was faster, stronger and smarter than me.

I have had similar iteration of this nightmare going on for decades now, but they're almost a daily occurrence at this point.

Mass job losses concerns me, but at the same time feels like the most manageable aspect of what's coming and therefore something I've been prepping for for many years at this point. We will almost all be poorer as a result of this technology, but we'll still have our loved ones around us and assuming we don't enter this period in debt can continue to live a decent life by historical standards.

It's what comes after this that should really worry people... A society with mass job loss and poverty is not stable. The extreme concentration of power AI will bring to those who yield it will not be conducive to a continued peaceful world order. The technologies that will be created from the US of AI might cure cancer but they will also enable unthinkable horrors to be inflicted on our bodies. Creating a species that's more intelligent than ourselves opens a can of worms which we may not be able to control.

I've been very poor before. It's unpleasant but after a while you normalise emotionally and it's okay. It's everything else that I worry about. I can survive and manage being poor. But super viruses, world wars, AI-driven mass-surveillance, the erosion of reality and fiction from AI powered propaganda, democratic collapse. These are all things I struggle to know how to prepare for.

I know I sound crazy. I assure you I'm a very sane person, I just seem think it's rather obvious that very bad things are coming soon. And I'd argue this has always been obvious to anyone thinking about the consequences of AI rationally.

Hey, I get the feeling. A couple years ago. I worked in a massive project where delivery pressure was high and affected the quality level that I strongly felt was necessary. I remained there for a while, did my best to compromise and improve the general situation best I could but it took a big toll on my health.

In retrospect, three things helped keep me sane-ish:

- community: finding colleagues that shared my perception of the situation and with whom to organise to raise quality.

- perspective: my country, like most, has a bloody history. My predecessors survived feudal exploitation, industrialization and countless wars. None of them were exceptional. While this falls under survivorship bias, the challenges we face and the opportunity we have are, in the core western world, comparatively simpler

- preparedness: keep a cheap lifestyle, my passport up to date, money in the bank, gas in the tank and my body in as good a shape as I can. It's more of a psychological trick to feel in control of some aspects of my life. But it's a good idea in general anyway.

Writing about my fears and transcribing them from my head to a sheet where I could confront them and organise them helped too.

It's not great or original advice, but I wanted to give it anyway so that you know that other out there go through similar mindscapes. Good luck out there.

I find AI painfully limited and dumb for all but the most repetitive common sub problems. I feel great.

Try to become an SME on the business side in addition to technical abilities.

For example understanding how financial instruments work and how to model them onto systems is a valuable skills and cannot be fully trusted (yet) in the hands of AI as mistakes can be really really costly.

It isn't 10% less quality. It is more like 90% less quality. It does great at basic coding, but still royally sucks at system design. It codes itself into corners that need to be completely refactored. It picks the first path it sees that works, even if there are better solutions, because it doesn't understand what is available as built-in features of different tech stacks and platform. Or, to be more accurate, it doesn't understanding a single thing it is saying, so has zero thought to put into what is actually the correct solution. My favorite one is when it delivered a DB schema to me that re-invented auto-incrementing fields by creating new stored procedures and triggers... for IDs that weren't even auto-incremented.

So I feel just fine. I use AI when it helps, I do the work myself when it doesn't. All you need to do is learn which is which.

Let's assume that everything you say is true. Then your hope and your identity need to be in something other than your work and your paycheck.

For me, personally, I'm a Christian. My hope and my identity are in Jesus Christ. AI may take over programming, and paychecks may drop. But my identity is not in what I do or how much I make. Those things ultimately aren't going to be what makes my life work.

You need that, from somewhere - somewhere other than your work and your paycheck.

But I don't actually think that everything you say is true. Companies will not tolerate careful work? No, some companies will not tolerate careful work. You don't really want to work at those companies - not now, and you didn't before, because they didn't care about careful work then either. You especially don't want to work at those companies now, because the lack of care is going to slap them hard in the fairly near future.

The good news is that, under current circumstances, it has become easier to tell which kind of company is which.

I mean, look, the situation is not great. It really isn't. But you are fixing your attention only on the negative, and it's giving you a distorted picture of reality. You are seeing some things that are true, but you are taking them to be the whole truth, and they aren't.

Realize that the tech industry lives on hype. Every new piece of technology is 'going to upend everything'; according to those building it.

Us old programmers have live through about 100 of these hype cycles; so experience tells us to not panic.

AI is definitely a real thing like the internet, but it won't replace every programmer. Study it. Use it for things it is good at. Adapt to be useful in areas it is not good at.

I had to completely detach my ego from my day job. If they just want fast, good-enough code to ship today, let the AI churn it out and just collect the paycheck. Don't fight it. Save your ego and mental energy for your own side projects where you can actually take your time and build things right. Work is just a transaction now.

As what is regarded as an 'old programmer', I wouldn't worry. AI may well be 60% faster at coding, but the quality is more like 90% worse. Like everything new, give it time: the hype will settle down, some AI companies will go bust, and everything will be fine.