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I always was a nerdy, deeply technical programmer. Contributing-to-open-source-and-reading-papers-in-my-spare-time type of programmer.

Programming is like a game of chess for me: winning (i.e. delivering a product) is important, but only if I played this game myself. I don't enjoy winning if my opponent disconnected. I don't enjoy beating people who don't know how to move pieces. I don't enjoy winning with an engine, and coding agents are basically "winning with a chess engine".

I started to use AI for coding a long time ago, when copilot was first introduced. At first, I was happy: "wow, this can write boring boilerplate and unit tests". Time went by, agents got better, time spent writing code myself went down. Half a year ago I suddenly realized I hadn't written any code for over a month, and I am a full-time software dev without any managing work. Not only did I stop writing code, but agents also became pretty good at proposing plans and architectures, and I was mostly providing missing context and technical details of our infrastructure.

One day the realization hit hard. Coding agents removed everything I loved, and - mostly - amplified everything I hated. My role is to gather context from other humans and provide a detailed explanation (similar to a well-written jira ticket) to some super intelligent engineer, then review the result and provide more context/explanation if needed. So, basically, a manager.

A couple of years ago I could work on a single coding task for weeks. I knew all classes, all functions, I was slowly building up information at a comfortable tempo. Now I am forced to increase my mental throughput multiple times. What took a couple of weeks now takes a couple of hours, and I still need to comprehend that. I always feel tired, I don't have enough mental capacity to hold that many abstractions and technical details. So you either autoaccept or get burned out reviewing tens of thousands of lines.

One more downside is that code has 0 value. You can code your own OS from scratch, and people will think "ye, I can vibe code that in a weekend". I don't even know what is valuable nowadays.

Maybe I am a bad employee. Increasing employer profits was never my goal. I always loved to solve puzzles, and for the last 10 years this was well aligned with my employer's desire to increase profits. I never was good as a manager, or brilliant at generating ideas. My power - and passion - was solving complex technical problems with my hands, fast and with good quality. Now it is gone forever. I feel completely lost and unmotivated. I don't see any value in learning anything related to computer science, reading papers, contributing to open source. I hate my new "AI delegator" role and I hate my work. I loved coding so much (I use neovim btw) that I was sure I would do this until I die, and now I don't know what to do with my life. This is the only thing I know, and, most importantly, the only thing I am/was passionate about. Anyone else feeling the same?

People who never really had these feelings about coding will turn up to tell you that you are wrong to care or that it is childish or silly to care.

You are not wrong to have your feelings or to strongly identify your sense of self with your work; that is what we used to call “finding your vocation”.

I share your feelings and have been focusing my energy on learning local and open weights AI to work through it because it seems to be impossible to avoid it all entirely as a freelancer who needs to remain competitive, and a bit of righteous/ethics/sustainable process fire in my belly doesn’t hurt.

But focusing on how you feel first, and then hopefully thinking about other ways you can feel valuable, is not wrong.

You are not alone and I wish you the best.

I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. Seems like most of them are happy to "be able to do great things without boring coding"... but gathering information and setting a task is an entirely different profession.

I'm always curious, what are those "great things" requiring deep technical knowledge and years of expertise that these visionaries can finally provide with the help of LLMs?

I almost feel ashamed/mentally ill when i am reading how everyone is happy that their true visionnaire potential is finally unlocked while i just like to solve my silly puzzles.

Well you have no reason to feel ashamed or mentally ill.

Everything has, in fact, changed, and it is a task for those of us who cared about what was, to try to work out what is worth caring about.

As Annie Savoy says in Bull Durham, “the world is made for those who aren’t cursed with self-awareness”. You’re going to have to figure out new things to care about, but you can do it, because you found it the first time!

Thanks!

What did you found for yourself?

I am struggling to be honest, but I am learning how to make stuff with CAD and 3D printers and plotting my escape towards teaching (adults), because I have spoken to enough lifelong learners to know that AI is not satisfying important parts of the adult learning process.

I am reconciling myself to the AI future by learning open weights tools, and I hope to learn how to use that in assistive technology.

Do you enjoy explaining things?

Sadly, I am not. But I enjoy manual labor. I am leaning towards construction/electrics. But most likely just wait couple more years and retire with enough money to never work again

The irony is, my work is to train frontier llm's, so my own "child" killed my lifelong passion

> You’re going to have to figure out new things to care about, but you can do it, because you found it the first time!

I have found many interesting things to care about. The problem is they all lack a single quality that allowed me to succeed in the realm of computers and technology: accessibility.

3D printers, CAD, CNC, all affordable and IMO accessible (and will run on cheap old kit). No matter what people say, LLMs are not coming for real world adaptable parametric designs any time soon.

ETA: whether there is a way forward for a replacement career I don't know. But there is a way forward for a replacement interest and there are ways to use this to help people.

Code generated with AI has no worth (i think), even if its a core piece of any system.

I think the architecture around systems is un-replaceable like what I do now, is I create specs and then asks the agents to cook exactly as the spec.

What's your AI workflow btw?

All code has no worth, any code can be replicated in a short amount of time. Only ideas is valuable. Not saying it is bad thing, but i enjoyed opensource, and now i don't see any value in supporting my project and contributing to other's. No one care anymore.

>architecture Give me a reason why agent can't create great architecture when enough context is provided?

Oh yeah, context is the thing. But I believe you need to know what's going-on on architectural level.

For example If I ask LLM to build an analytics system where, there is soooo much data to ingest and LLM uses postgresql for the DB but we know ClickHouse is the great fit here, given the analytics queries we need. So, then you are right LLM can definitly figure out ClickHouse or something better, If we provide full context of what we want, but getting to know the full system and feeding LLM with the right context is something where we need understanding of the tech-stack atleast in general (might not be specific to the underline language).

I don't believe LLM can ever build a system from end-to-end reliably.

Indeed. Vibe coding is making those of us in tech lose ourselves more and more.

We used to be obsessed with elegant design and would lose sleep over an optimization. Since vibe coding came along, those days are gone for good. As technologists, we typically feel anxious about losing control over our code. The speed of AI makes it nearly impossible for us to carefully review the code.

We know AI makes mistakes all the time, and our job has become that of an AI corrector.

I mostly strongly identify with this. Been coding for ~35 years, if you count toy programs on a Spectrum. My world is being completely destroyed. And it's probably normal. I also don't understand TikTok, new Avengers, or queueing for bubble tea. That's why evolution invented death (and renewal).

One outlet in all this AI craze is finding creative use of it in mundane work. For example, recently I made SIMD-level optimizations for XLS parser that is used maybe 2 times per day. Before AI I could never waste a week or two on doing something silly like that.

I'm sure the "price reckoning" will come to us when VC will find out they didn't have infinite money, but for now we can have some level of fun even with AI.

I relate to this on a deep level. I have been writing software professionally for 18 years. Programming was the fun part of the job. Solving deep technical problems, digging through docs, etc. All that seems to be gone now. Unfortunately the business does not care about any of the above, all that matters is output. My job pays me for output therefore I have no choice but to embrace the Claude pandemic.

I wish I had better news, but really just want you to know you are not alone and I empathize with you. I do think there is a cost to pay when using AI to output all of the code. A deep mental model is impossible and this will have downstream impacts. I am hopeful this will settle into a happy middle ground where AI is used but not relied upon.

> the Claude pandemic

Wow. This phrasing hits home so hard.

I have a CS degree and have been a SWE for 13 years but never really developed a love of coding or software in general, I just happened to learn it and be pretty good at it in 2008. But even I have lost a bit of my identity, having one of the few things I have done most days for a decade+ be commoditized is pretty brutal no matter how I feel about software. For the past few years I've been trying to see where the puck is going (I've been leaning towards moving into management) but at this point I'm just trying to hold on until I reach financial independence. I assume my viewpoint is probably square in the middle of most folks in my position.

I switched gear to learn how to train AI, design evals and explore neuroscience so we can further apply how our brains better in the new world. I enjoy coding, but it's time to adapt.

I came to this realization after I used Cursor to rewrite a 10-year old codebase (I knew every bit of the details.) and it was done in 2 days. Better, fewer technical debt and I was happy to archive the old repo.

Yeah, I am also interested in learning how LLMs works. So planning to spend some time on building a toy LLM to understand the principles.

Do you have any resource in your had which you could suggest?

I use this primarily to exercise my brain. https://cs336.stanford.edu/

Different kinds of logic puzzles. They are also good stimulus to our brain and valuable skills.

Most senior level programmers have 2 options. (junior / early-mid level folks may want to consider re-skilling to a different field)

1. Embrace the AI and continue working and earning for as long as you can. Bank as much savings as possible. Lower your cost of living. Hopefully you've already been doing this over the past decade plus, when times were good. FIRE.

2. Don't use AI to write code. Write code yourself, as you've always done. Then, just see how long you last at work. If AI truly progresses, then long term most programmer jobs as we know them today are going to disappear. So worst case you will be let go a little earlier than your peers.

The devs using AI to write all their code are going to suffer major or complete atrophy of their coding skills. It's only been about a year of this and we're already seeing it occur. Maybe this doesn't matter long term and manual coding is truly dead, or maybe it comes full circle and we get back to programmers programming, in which case you will have a massive leg up on the NPC "programmers" who haven't written code in years because they surrendered their craft -and brain- to AI agents.

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