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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
In the 1950s, computers were starting to go mainstream and everyone panicked that they'll lose their job due to "automation". Some jobs were lost for sure, but so many other jobs were created that computers "demanded".
The same thing happened in the late 50s / early 60s when high-level programming languages and compilers started to appear. Almost all software at that time was hand-written assembly. Compilers took a decade to reach the same quality (sometimes even better) of hand-written assembly. Programmers adapted and started thinking at a higher level of abstraction.
Another example is virtual memory. Up until the late 1960s most software used manual physical memory management techniques (mainly overlays) to decide which part of the program should reside in memory at certain points of time. Everyone was skeptical and thought that virtual memory would be less optimal than manually-designed overlays. There was a lot of research in that area during the time to prove that virtual memory can have the same or even better performance than hand-rolled approaches.
The point is: AI may well be disruptive to the way we develop software, but we're still in a transition phase where trust in AI output is very shaky. It's impressive, but it hasn't established itself yet as an abstraction we can trust and build on without thinking about what it's producing. It will take time, and humans will always have more work to do no matter how technology advances.
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'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.
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.
Explore help in all the forms you can find. Feel free to contact me if you like. I'm happy to meet people and do a phone call or video call. I'm not hard to find with a little digging.
I've been through a fair amount of situations in my life, and I don't think have any illusions about places AI could go. I'm definitely not an optimist -- and I don't think being naively optimistic is something we want in everyone! -- but I'm still fighting. I think it takes a lot more strength to say "the world is looking pretty messed up and not getting better if I just sit here, so here we go..." Here are some things I suggest:
- Seek connection and community. This depends where you live, but get out there. Coffee shops, volunteering, just saying hello to people.
- Fill your brain with interesting thoughts. If you are feeling rough or depressed, you naturally may want to feel lifted up most of the time. Everybody needs a break, a laugh, some levity, or at least a change.
- But not everyone, at least not all the time, truly wants a fake sense of "everything is going to be fine". Sometimes we need to find people that are fully engaged in reality who say "yes, this is unacceptable and not getting better anytime soon but we're not giving up". And they find ways to still move forward.
- Back to the personal connections again!: It helps me to know people who have come to the US from other places in worse conditions. It helps to know that people can move forward even when many things are terribly broken. From this point of view, humanity really can be impressive. (To me, sometimes I'm most critical of people who get complacent when things seem good.)
- So, to me, and many others (Stoics especially), pessimism has a huge role to play. Things could go very badly. There are no guarantees. So get prepared -- getting prepared for tough times is a concrete activity that has meaning.
- More sunshine for you: You might benefit most by reading some really hard-hitting authors. Read about how f--ked up wars can be, how precarious the Cold War was. But somehow we made it through. There are no do-overs. Hopefully people realize the best time to do something was yesterday, but today is pretty good too!
- Train your mind. It feels good to invest in your own thinking. I recommend finding the most substantive and engaging material you can find about understanding how your brain works. For many people, this opens up a whole new set of tools.
- Find sources of inspiration. Personally, I'm a secular humanist. I've found great wisdom in the book Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares. You might too. https://replacingguilt.com/toc/ Some of my favorite sections are:
> The last arc of posts has been about how to handle a dour universe. Become unable to despair, learn to see the darkness rather than flinching from it, learn to choose between bad and worse without suffering. Learn to live in a grim world without becoming grim yourself, learn to hear bad news without suffering, and stop needing to know your actions were acceptable. Come to terms with the fact you may lose, use the darkness as a source of fuel, and let go of dreams of total victory. These are the tools I use to tap into intrinsic motivation, in a precarious world where the problems are larger than I am.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I find AI painfully limited and dumb for all but the most repetitive common sub problems. I feel great.
In the 1950s, computers were starting to go mainstream and everyone panicked that they'll lose their job due to "automation". Some jobs were lost for sure, but so many other jobs were created that computers "demanded".
The same thing happened in the late 50s / early 60s when high-level programming languages and compilers started to appear. Almost all software at that time was hand-written assembly. Compilers took a decade to reach the same quality (sometimes even better) of hand-written assembly. Programmers adapted and started thinking at a higher level of abstraction.
Another example is virtual memory. Up until the late 1960s most software used manual physical memory management techniques (mainly overlays) to decide which part of the program should reside in memory at certain points of time. Everyone was skeptical and thought that virtual memory would be less optimal than manually-designed overlays. There was a lot of research in that area during the time to prove that virtual memory can have the same or even better performance than hand-rolled approaches.
The point is: AI may well be disruptive to the way we develop software, but we're still in a transition phase where trust in AI output is very shaky. It's impressive, but it hasn't established itself yet as an abstraction we can trust and build on without thinking about what it's producing. It will take time, and humans will always have more work to do no matter how technology advances.
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'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.
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.
Explore help in all the forms you can find. Feel free to contact me if you like. I'm happy to meet people and do a phone call or video call. I'm not hard to find with a little digging.
I've been through a fair amount of situations in my life, and I don't think have any illusions about places AI could go. I'm definitely not an optimist -- and I don't think being naively optimistic is something we want in everyone! -- but I'm still fighting. I think it takes a lot more strength to say "the world is looking pretty messed up and not getting better if I just sit here, so here we go..." Here are some things I suggest:
- Seek connection and community. This depends where you live, but get out there. Coffee shops, volunteering, just saying hello to people.
- Fill your brain with interesting thoughts. If you are feeling rough or depressed, you naturally may want to feel lifted up most of the time. Everybody needs a break, a laugh, some levity, or at least a change.
- But not everyone, at least not all the time, truly wants a fake sense of "everything is going to be fine". Sometimes we need to find people that are fully engaged in reality who say "yes, this is unacceptable and not getting better anytime soon but we're not giving up". And they find ways to still move forward.
- Back to the personal connections again!: It helps me to know people who have come to the US from other places in worse conditions. It helps to know that people can move forward even when many things are terribly broken. From this point of view, humanity really can be impressive. (To me, sometimes I'm most critical of people who get complacent when things seem good.)
- So, to me, and many others (Stoics especially), pessimism has a huge role to play. Things could go very badly. There are no guarantees. So get prepared -- getting prepared for tough times is a concrete activity that has meaning.
- More sunshine for you: You might benefit most by reading some really hard-hitting authors. Read about how f--ked up wars can be, how precarious the Cold War was. But somehow we made it through. There are no do-overs. Hopefully people realize the best time to do something was yesterday, but today is pretty good too!
- Train your mind. It feels good to invest in your own thinking. I recommend finding the most substantive and engaging material you can find about understanding how your brain works. For many people, this opens up a whole new set of tools.
- Find sources of inspiration. Personally, I'm a secular humanist. I've found great wisdom in the book Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares. You might too. https://replacingguilt.com/toc/ Some of my favorite sections are:
See the dark world : https://mindingourway.com/see-the-dark-world/
Detach the grim-o-meter : https://mindingourway.com/detach-the-grim-o-meter/
Dark, Not Colorless : https://mindingourway.com/dark-not-colorless/
> The last arc of posts has been about how to handle a dour universe. Become unable to despair, learn to see the darkness rather than flinching from it, learn to choose between bad and worse without suffering. Learn to live in a grim world without becoming grim yourself, learn to hear bad news without suffering, and stop needing to know your actions were acceptable. Come to terms with the fact you may lose, use the darkness as a source of fuel, and let go of dreams of total victory. These are the tools I use to tap into intrinsic motivation, in a precarious world where the problems are larger than I am.