alt Hacker NewsI wrote this, currently at -2 points, a mere 24 hours ago, as a response to simonw unbounded and unwarranted optimism:
>>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
>I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class.
>You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).
>Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.
>And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.