Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs. There was an arrogance that those people deserved it because they couldn't upgrade themselves. Nobody will feel sorry for software devs, who have been privileged enough to have had high respect and pay for quite a long time. İt may be sad but it's just the case that the only thing different this time is the fact that's its "knowledge work" that's being replaced, and the smart people now find themselves in the position where the common man has found themselves time and time again. İ do feel sorry for devs as overall they are quite a good group of people, As opposed to bankers and brokers and lawyers who I personally am praying they get replaces asap, unfortunately the only thing protecting them at the moment are the regulatory moats.

People will simple have to find some new work, it sucks but some of us have been dealing with not being wanted by corpo-world our whole lives despite our skills, and we are still here. You will all be fine. Much love to all who are going through this.

After 40 years in development I have never known a time like this. Half of my colleagues seem to be in denial, the other half seem to be slowly cracking up. The future is going to be very different, very soon.

IIRC the 2001 bust had people cracking up too, and you'd have been fifteen-odd years in by then. But that was about jobs disappearing, not the craft itself being questioned. I'll concede that part is new.

It's depressing. Those in denial are really difficult to work with now.. they have a hard time adapting to such fundamental changes but their denial leads to sabotaging the adaption efforts of the rest. The other half like you mentioned is only slowly cracking up like still trying to grasp that this ai thing isn't some new tool you will have mastered in a few days. There are right now only very few people who have mastered state of the art ai development and they would like to work with only those also in this camp because it's so depressing to watch the majority of developers wrestling to find their spot in this new world.

I definitely had to leave my job after realizing what was happening to the company and to my brain on LLMs. Constantly using AI is not healthy and there’s no out except to leave.

At my employer, every incentive, every metric, every conversation, was aligned behind using AI. Every team performance meeting pulled up graphs on whether velocity was increasing beyond last quarter’s metrics, which should be going up because of AI. Choosing not to use it inevitably means getting let go since I’d be working at slower speeds. But as team lead this was already happening because all my time was spent reviewing slop and I had no time to produce my own code, because the entire team was being reckless with their submissions. I was going at 1/3 the speed of everyone else trying to keep things coherent. My manager preferred to fix forward rather than address my concerns that we were producing tech debt at 10x speeds, so none of my comments were addressed. As soon as our prototype was done, the other most senior engineer and I pleaded that we rewrite it from scratch before getting it to prod, but that of course would have been a two month setback. By now, all of upper management were ending every quarterly meeting with “If you don’t like AI, then leave now”.

I haven’t looked back, and I don’t think it will go well for them.

I think the capital vs labor structure here obscures the most interesting dynamics going on. I mean, sure there are a bunch of greedy execs that would love to reduce head count and are pretty out of touch so that they have a high degree of not really knowing or caring about the people on the front lines while also not really understanding what they do or if it even can be replaced. This is the same story since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and probably well before that.

But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.

I’m fine. I’ve made a career out of automating work previously done by people. I’ve no right to complain now I’m less of a bottleneck in the process.

I disagree with the "no right to complain" part. Past automation was something you did, with tools you owned, and the productivity stayed with you. Now the tool is rented from three companies and trained on your own work. That's a different deal, and being annoyed about it isn't hypocrisy.

This is what I don't get. I've spent my whole live using technology to automate work in some form or the other. I've reached for any/every tool that made that processes easier, that made it easier to build and maintain software. Now comes along a tool that can automate a ton of the things I couldn't automate, or it has the "time" to automate the things I never could get around to, it can write code consistently better than I can and faster, it writes the tests I hated writing, it "remembers" to do more checks - more consistently, it runs 10 commands to diagnose an issue while I'll still poking around on the box. It lets me finally tackle tech debt that was _never going to get done_ (I cannot stress this enough).

We hit this on my team too. The frustration usually isn't the automation, it's that the job quietly turned into reviewing diffs all day instead of building. What helped us: small PRs only, tests written before the agent touches anything, and a short conventions file in the repo. Reviewing stays tolerable that way, and you still understand the code.

What i observe here from the 3rd world country (technically European Union, but everything outside of the Valley is 3rd world when it comes to coding) is by far not as traumatic.

People who used to do coding jobs in order to extract the money from Americans, just switched to different kinds of online scams, which they believed coding to be simply one of, perhaps legitimately so.

So far, it seems like outside of just being a SWE, the value derived from AI coding has been either through influencing, scamming, or devaluing existing things.

For any given product, the instant it is made (using AI or no) and distributed, its value drops to practically zero. It can be remade and modified infinitely at practically zero cost.

The tools that make everything worthless somehow still cost $200 a month.

Reading the stories, I’m happy to be working at a place where management is AI-skeptical. They do allow developers to use LLMs, but the token budget is $5.

I’ve decided not to complain.

$5 as in 5 dollars? I'm genuinely curious, how did they get to that number? I could understand 20 since that's the price of the cheapest AI subscriptions but 5 seems arbitrary and unusable.

The moment is delicate, but this has always happened. In the computer world changes follow one another at an impressive pace. I got passionate about computers in the early '80s with the Commodore VIC-20, and then on and on until the arrival of AI systems. Every time it was a new challenge: from typing in decimal codes for 6502 assembly to the C language, passing through BASIC and Pascal. Then object-oriented programming turned everything upside down: from functions and the procedural method to objects, and every time generations of programmers had to start again from zero. Today is no different. We are moving from writing code to designing architectures. We are not asked to learn how to write something, but to imagine how to build complex systems. We have to face the challenge of evolving from worker to engineer: not "doing" but "designing" and "imagining". No more arms and hands, but mind and imagination.

From the article:

> In woodworking, the power tools didn’t reduce the woodworker’s emotional investment in what they made. The worker still felt like they’d made that thing out of wood themselves.

This raises the question - is the software engineer the tool or the thing being made? And who is the woodworker?

SE who worked for big tech thinking they were any different than the farm worker are now disillusioned

Maybe there are multiple bubbles slowly imploding at once here.

> I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out

I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.

My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.

I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.

This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50025798

Has anyone actually separated the tools from the mandates? Half the stories here, kren's included, sound like management tracking AI usage numbers, not developers being worn down by the tools themselves. Would the dread look the same if adoption were optional?