Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.

This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?

You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.

You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY).

You are just throwing a temper tantrum (https://archive.is/YNxJq).

Do not commit blasphemy against AI. (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i...)

This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on

It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.

They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.

I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.

If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.

Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged!

The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)

I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.

I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.

That's so true!

As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.

I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.

What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.

To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.

So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other

Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.

On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.

The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.

But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.

Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.

It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.

I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.

I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.

I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.

The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.

Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?

I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.

I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.

I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.

I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.

As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.

As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.

I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.

I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.

So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.

LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.

I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.

But I gather from reading this that you are young.

The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.

If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.

This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.

Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.

(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)

You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.

I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.

Basically a lot more time spent on "how should this work?" vs before a lot more time spent on "how can this work?"

I hadn't realized people were already looking through inherited-nostalgia glasses back at 2016.

Instead you'd have written a post complaining about the ad-tech space - which is still a deep pit of human depravity and unhappiness mascaraing as a positive on society.

The value-add startup you're imagining still exists. Just not anywhere near the bubble where people are talking about wanting 500k salaries.

Some context - I'm a frontend dev and I've lost all interest in work, I just see it as a way to pay my bills now. I'm trying to practice drawing because I want to draw fanart of my favourite characters, and I want it to be meaningful. I've already dabbled with stable diffusion back in the day and I got bored of it because it was just way too easy and didn't require any effort, and thus it didn't feel any rewarding either.

Excitement. Fear of job loss. Fun at vibecoding toys. Worry about falling behind. Apprehension about how society will deal with this

Just because the job becomes obsolete doesn't mean the employee has to. Some employees have adapted to different jobs and roles many times in their careers.

> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier

I used to think this around 10 years ago. I eventually learned this kind of thinking is defeatist and figured if others are able to succeed in this environment then I can.

> there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.

Just like how people think ideas are a dime a dozen, software will be. The value will be in polish, ongoing maintenance, feature development, and the incorporation of customer feedback.

> I can't think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better

Users are notoriously bad at noticing small improvements over time. A more interesting thing way to see the impact of AI is to ask employees at big companies what it has allowed them to work on and release in a previously unimaginable time frame.

AI doesn't make me sad but this drives me crazy. I don't want racists banned, I want replies to posts that don't make any earthly sense banned. I want twitter to stop you before a post and say "did you even read the post?" "Are you just posting because you want to participate?" "Banned for nonresponsiveness." "Six other commenters submitted comments almost exactly like yours, are you sure yours in necessary?"

Shouldn't AI have solved this? I can't imagine that it's holding people on the site - maybe it pushes up some badly done interaction metric. But there should be a last AI check before submission: "Are you dumb? If you are dumb, press submit, but I have to warn you that the comment you're replying to has showdumb:off."

The AI hype and AI doom are 2 sides of the same coin. Yes you can make a cool demo quickly with a prompt, but building a real company with moats is still possible, much easier even. The moats have just changed: proprietary data, distribution, access rights, eval sets, integrations, compliance brand, just not the code.