Straight from the department of redundancy department.

My answer to you is that I fully expect the ability to do stuff yourself to be seen as extremely valuable in about 2 or 3 years. This whole AI thing is pretty definitely a bubble, and on top of that it also looks to me like the blockchain and metaverse tech-fads, and I strongly believe that when the bubble bursts people that can say “I spent all that time learning to do things myself rather than rely on ai to do my thinking for me” are going to be the only people with careers.

Well, I personally don’t give a shit whether something is made by a human or a machine as long as the code is performing well and is readable.

Lucky for you and me both, AI is nowhere near capable of replacing a developer.

Learning new things is still needed, AI is good for mediocre tasks that need no real intelligence, but anything else still needs a human.

I struggle with similar feelings, although in other disciplines. I’m going to ask you the same questions I ask myself because they help center me when I’m in a similar mental space.

Who do you create for? Do you create for those people that don’t value your work? Do you create for yourself, for your own satisfaction? Do you create for external recognition?

I think we’ll turn this corner as a society, especially as everything becomes further enshittified. Inherent value and authenticity, the process and the work are all things that I do believe we all care about, but we’ve been spoiled with the convenience of everything.

I hope things get better for you.

I recommend a movie night.

I’m rapidly feeling like it’s pointless to bother learning when you can badly cobble something together with a chatbot and the managers of the world will ejaculate themselves dry about how good robots are, even when the bloody thing barely functions.

Rhetorical question: How much of your decade of development has been in a professional capacity

That has ALWAYS been true. A barely functioning Proof Of Concept has always been sexy. Someone has an idea, they make a barely functioning example of it working (often depending on stack overflow and asking others for help), show it to Management, and get money. With Management often thinking how they can either rapidly patent something in there or sell it off to a larger company.

Nothing there is new aside from “AI” replacing “ask Stack Overflow”.

And, just to be clear, that was also true in the hobbyist space. Think about how often you saw an article like “someone recreated PT in Unreal Engine!!!” (not to mention PT itself being the kind of project you give a new hire to learn the toolchain but…). Same with all those emulators that “added VR” and so forth. They are cool concepts that tend to not go anywhere or…

Once a POC becomes a Product? That is where knowledge matters. You no longer want the answer someone shat out while waiting for a belle claire video to download. You need to actually define your corner cases, improve performance, and build out a roadmap.

And… that ALSO isn’t about learning new tools and tech. A lot of that comes out of it, but that is where the difference between “computer programmer” and "software engineer’ comes into play. Because it becomes an engineering problem where you define and implement testing frameworks and build out the gitlab issues and so forth.

Like, a LOT of dumbfucks try to speedrun their way to management because it is more money. But the reality is that a good Engineer SHOULD become a manager as they “grow up”. Because you need people with technical ability to have a say in building out that roadmap and in allocating resources to different issues. Optimally you still get to code a lot (I am a huge fan of middle management in that regard) but… yeah.

The drama here isn’t solely over the use of AI. In fact, your last comment any brainlessly using AI is closer to the cause of this drama. The project lead is pushing untested code straight to main, and the fact it was AI generated was an addendum/insult to injury.

A little lesson about technical projects: You will quickly reach 95% completion and have something amazing to show off. Then, 95% of the work is completing that last 5% in order to make the prototype usable.

AI is good at making itself look ready. It is nowhere near ready.

I would like to think some of it is class consciousness. “AI” inherently means fewer jobs. But considering the world we live in, I sincerely doubt the vast majority of people speaking out against it give a shit because “I am just demonstrating my value so the leopards won’t eat my face” and so forth.

Most of it is performative bullshit. Influencers who DID get fucked over (or decided this is why they didn’t get the job they wanted) have talked loud and proud about how evil it is and that is kind of where the conversation ends. “AI” is evil and nobody cares to think what “AI” actually means. I’ll never get tired of giving a depressed smirk when I see the same people who were championing the use of “magic” Adobe tools complaining about “AI” taking graphics design jobs and so forth. Same with the folk who have dozens of blog posts about using tools to generate their docstrings suddenly getting angry that “AI” does that too.

Personally? I very much DO care about the labor side. Not because I don’t think “AI” can do the job of an intern or even most early career staff (spend some time mentoring early career staff… I wish I just had to worry about six toes on a foot or code that would delete our prod tables if I don’t review it well enough). But because the only way for those dumbass kids to learn is by doing the tasks we would be getting rid of and that is already leading to a VERY rapid brain drain as it is increasingly hard to find staff who can actually do the job of a Senior role.

Which is the other issue… “AI” can do some stuff VERY well. Other stuff it is horrible at. And even more stuff that it “does well” is dictated by managers and “Prompt Engineers” and not actually the domain experts who can say “Yeah… this is good. THAT is complete dog shit”.

And then there is the IP theft part of things. People… are once again stupid and don’t realize that the folk posting answers on Stack Overflow were just as likely to have read that blog post where you talked about your cool algorithm. Or how much art is literally traced from others with no attribution and becomes part of major marketing campaigns. And while I think a MUCH bigger reckoning needs to happen regarding IP law and attribution… “AI” is just a symptom of the real problem.

A good rule of thumb when it comes to internet discourse that I sometimes remember to follow: Actually look at what the other person is writing and HOW they are writing it. There are very good odds you are talking to a literal child (or someone who never grew up). They are going to continue to insist that their life experiences (all five minutes of them) are the most important thing and you are never going to convince them otherwise. And… there isn’t a lot of point in trying in most of these discussions.

Because “These studies show that 99.9999999% of people don’t like sandpaper underpants so that is probably why Levi’s stopped selling it in 1972” versus “Well. I personally like sandpaper on my taint” invariably must become “Both sides have some good points and we need to agree to disagree” in the eyes of all the people who want to be enlightened centrists. The point is made and anyone who would have been convinced already is. Further discussion is just unsatisfying masturbation.

It sure is hard to ignore. You’ve got that right