Incredible blog post! I've been very much disagreeing with most mathematicians on this topic and also getting kind of annoyed at how ineloquent they are at getting to the point.
This on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).
The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.
Privacy community will probably never stop valuing that the code is actually human-readable with human level intent, purpose, and clarity, and that someone has read it hundreds of times and written it to be read that many times. It's been extremely interesting to work with ever better models to try to have it produce code that can do that, but with the clarity demands, LLMs still struggle doing anything more than accelerating a small subtask.
I used to get calls often from my friends to ask me questions about my area of expertise. Not urgent things, just friendly "hey--what if..." kinds of questions.
Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
This sounds like a bummer. But honestly I can't relate to this at all. I've never gotten calls like that. It's just not what my relationships with friends and family have ever been about. (Nobody cares about my expertise, and to the extent they have, they always just wanted me to fix their virus interested windows xp machine, because that's the limit of their understanding of what "computer people" know about, and I always hated that!)
I find this perspective to be narrow and uncurious. AI is disrupting community -- it is not utterly dissolving it. I see no evidence of that. So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect. In reality it is an evolution of the search engine which connects, navigates and further constructs digital civilization.
> So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect.
Because the ultra-rich people who are building and controlling most of it are using it to do exactly those things to society, because they aren't capable of sharing this planet with the rest of us equitably. Were it being used to empower humanity (instead of just a small handful of the worst of us), I'm pretty sure the "AI haters" would be a tiny minority at most (if they existed at all).
I agree that prompting is a much shallower skill than engineering, and I really hate the term “prompt engineering” since I feel it puts something that (by design) is easy to learn on the same level as something relatively hard to learn.
There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.
I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.
For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.
There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.
Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
It seems we (now more than ever) have to fight for fun, fight for a shared meaningful reality. Arriving again at the idea that enlightenment is a group activity.
I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
> even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI"
I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.
We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.
And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.
edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great
That’s great! I unironically hope you find those things interesting and AI has opened them up for you. I’m not trying to be snarky, but - along the lines of my attempted point upthread - has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
> has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
Yes! Lots.
It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff
For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration
Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.
Yes. I find it unexciting in quite a surprising way, and yet I resent how much of my brain it is taking up.
It should be incredibly exciting. I try to find the interesting parts that I can relate to, build on, survive with. But instead it feels like an ominous, featureless thief-of-joy grey goo coming for everything.
I think this feeling crystallised when I saw someone had used it to rebuild Prince of Persia and my immediate gut reaction was quite clear: I wanted to scream “could you please just fucking leave one good thing unsullied!?”
> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering.
Right now, that's the case, but I wouldn't put a Kalshi bet on it remaining that way.
I "grew up," from the days of pure Machine Code.
In Ye Days of Yore, all programmers were expected to understand a core dump, which is a printout (yes, a printout) of thousands of hex numbers, representing the memory of the server, when it crashed.
It's tempting to use this as some kind of bar of competence, but I am constantly astounded at the things that are produced by people that would absolutely freak out at a core dump.
In the early days of compiled/interpreted languages, even top-level programmers wrote in FORTRAN or BASIC. ASM was just getting its feet under it.
I think that we'll be seeing some marvelous stuff.
...as long as Skynet doesn't consider us a threat...
There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
I agree with you and disagree with the OP in similar ways.
I work on my own "agentically-engineered" projects and the pursuit of certain ideas for what you're calling intrinsic motivation, and I don't particularly care if others find it interesting or even find it at all or not, because the ideas themselves are cool to me.
It's kind of like I can suddenly tinker at 2,000% efficiency and share what I'm doing, _and if someone else finds it interesting, that's cool too_
Isn’t the point you’re making what OP is saying - that there are of course some humans who have deep intrinsic motivation, and they’ll continue to do what they do, but most humans aren’t wired this way, and for that, society will collapse?
This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
Yea it’s probably deep seated horror at slowly being replaced. I’m not sure what I feel but ordering a clanker around everyday is exhausting both emotionally and intellectually. I would rather not even talk to the thing, but they fucking suck at software architecture no matter what anyone says. You can’t just leave them alone with a task because you get the worst designs 7/10 times. The other 3/10 scare me enough that I’ve started learning how to install solar and battery systems online.
I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:
1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).
2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.
There's always some anxiety around job security, that's nothing new. I've been around enough rounds of that to know it well. This isn't that.
We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".
But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.
So: the anxiety is real and not new, but this phase of automation is really unique and different, because of "fundamental" "disruption" of "knowledge work". Consider me convinced, since this line of reasoning is original and not accounted for in the comment you're replying to.
For the last 2 years the frontier labs have been taking on funding at valuations that can only be justified if they replace vast swathes of human labor (and they have been pretty successful so far at automating large parts of software jobs, if not the jobs themselves yet), so the career doom and gloom is justified.
> then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.
There was also a period before google where people would discuss questions and topics. You know what most often response I got after the ubiquity of google? “Idk, google it, it’s not that hard, why are you asking me?” I just think AI is the new version of Google. At least at work, I have now started to hear more often than not “just use ChatGPT, it’ll do it for you, we don’t need to talk about it.”
I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
Well, even after Google came about, I always liked to ask people so I can have their perspective on a question, and because most of my coworkers were normal people who enjoy telling their own opinion on something (not the kind of troglodyte that would say “just use ChatGPT, ... we don’t need to talk about it”).
> I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
I think the key question we are facing is that while we cannot control those around us - who often need to adopt AI as an economic necessity - how can we ensure we are still able to find and ensure intellectual communities thrive?
I think for me I have made a conscious decision to continue writing even though lots of writers now use AI. I also find myself gravitating towards platforms like substack which already have a network of people who value human artifacts.
Thing is, Claude actually will answer you, and help you understand, in real time. Asking cynical humans does not have the same ROI. Stack Overflow died in large part because of the gatekeeping assholes.
This is largely true, but it is still sad, because interacting with a chatbot is not interacting with a community. At least you could assume that the gatekeeping assholes had a human judgment. I've never understood why so many questions on Exhange need to be closed for minor deviations of moderator norms, on a website meant for... asking questions.
> Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.
Maybe it's that to some people, earning something or creating something is more satisfying than stealing it, while to many other people it doesn't matter where it comes from. This is true in all walks of life. I never cheated on a test, but plenty of kids I knew did. Those people have no problem taking shortcuts because they don't understand the satisfaction of doing something right.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
No, the alphabet was secret knowledge belonging only to the initiated priest class before people stole it and divulged it to the public. Now you owe their descendants royalties for a lifetime use of the alphabet, unless you're a thief.
This is an incredibly bad metaphor. Nobody, no sane person at least, is claiming that they invented the alphabet and are therefore responsible for everything downstream of that.
The point about cheating on tests is that an exam is supposed to prove that you have internalized knowledge and are able to reason about it adequately. Cheating means that you reproduce the output of that understanding, without actually having done the work of understanding. Chinese Room.
Genuine and good faith question: why can't you find intellectual community anywhere else?
A bit harsh, I know, but it seems like rather a waste if we consider ourselves software people and make that our whole. If AI has replaced the need for intellectual community in software, can't we just fulfill that same need elsewhere?
Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity? May this not turn out to be an opportunity?
There's been a shift over the past while. I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.
Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.
I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.
At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.
So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.
When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.
Not the same as me having a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.
Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities
What's interesting to me is that some of these communities are remaining strong despite the AI tidal wave. Although it might be my bubble. For instance, there is still a thriving art scene on instagram which has successfully demarcated itself from AI art. There is also a writing community on substack. Are there hobbyist programming communities out there that can keep the practice of human coding alive?
currently in my experience, no, there's a total collapse on the front of people making code by hand for the sake of art. In the past six months, I've begun to suspect that I might soon be the last person on the planet doing it without any AI assistance in my job. It's been a brutally fast change.
Sorry to be an ass, but is coding really art? I applaud your dedication and craft, but I sort of doubt it.
With code, there is usually a right and wrong approach to things, and though we may find great joy in the right approach, programs are not subjective the same way a painting is.
A lot of what I do is custom UI work, including casual games. So I'm creating elements and interactions that fit together in novel ways. Some of that, I'd consider to be art. There's quite a bit of subjective taste and judgment involved, much like in painting or music. I mean, you're right that there's also a lot of coding that is not art, but there's still more than one right approach to almost anything when it comes to selecting your tools, and I think there's at least artisanship in writing elegant code even if it's for something boring.
There’s a lot in your reply here, but I’m just going to address the main point for brevity.
You might have misunderstood me because of my examples—-they were really not the point.
If not a book club, fine, then why not a writing club? Anything works here, and the example is not as important as the underlying point.
With a group of people who get together every now and then to write, I would consider that meeting all the qualifications you listed: creating not consuming, plenty of opportunity for creative ideas, other professionals available to create with, longer term projects. You even mentioned this very example already, with your analogy of submitting a novel.
If you’ve lost your intellectual community or creative outlet with software, why not explore other creative outlets, ones that are truly creative and fulfilling by your standards?
>Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity?
It's the stakes. Sure it was fun and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately it meant something because there was a prestige that came with cultivating a skill that brought the ultimate external validation: abnormally high pay and prestige. It was the blending of those two things that made it so special. Not a soulless pursuit of money, but also not a naive pursuit of something for passion alone. You could spend your days diving deep into something fascinating and it was highly lucrative. Now it seems we're left to choose one or the other.
On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…
Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)
I think there is high uncertainty of how the world will change. My personal plan has two arms.
1) Be at the top of applying AI. The frontier overestimates of how able the average person is of applying what’s possible now. I would hope that with my software I can make money for a couple of more years. I constantly test my ideas on how far I can scale them through AI and what angles could be not as easily replicated. I’m aware that the average knowledge is catching up and I’m not faster. One could argue that also the expectation of how a software works gets higher. So users have lower attention spans want customized landing pages and UX needs to be more visual intuitive. So part of the gain in downstream benefitting users.
2) You can argue very long about 1) and I have arguments for both sides. So far it works for me and the numbers are on my side, however on the other side my plan B or 2) in this case is getting ready for life outside. I’m going in front of the camera I’m improving my talking skills I’m try to learn to build things. If you want if all knowledge work is gone. It’s literally entertainment, work with your body, serving or selling. I personally like entertainment most of that.
I’ve been trying to predict and I’ve changed my mind often, so now I’m just saying I don’t really know how the world’s gonna change.
> People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive.
I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.
I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.
I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.
> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?
It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.
I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.
Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.
Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.
Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript.
And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.
I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.
The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.
For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.
> Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
Yep, this is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say.
And to the rest, I wholeheartedly agree. My ability to build and ship has been multiplied and continues to grow and I absolutely love it. There are growing pains and things are changing quickly but I find it exciting and energized as well.
Throughout the history of computing the number of developers has been climbing as has the demand. In that time the ability of 1 developer has increased, on average, to be able to accomplish more in the same amount of time/effort. Will the industry change? Undoubtedly, but automated out of a job? I doubt it. More companies will find it financially viable to hire a full-time developer who can do what would overwhelm a single person in the past, or hire a small team that can execute at the level of a much larger team.
LLMs actually _improved_ this for me, because they can be the sparring partner and the endless lexicon of interconnected thoughts, most other humans simply lack the ability to.
They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.
I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though.
It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.
Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.
___
I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.
Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.
Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.
You do realize Americans are /less/ likely to move now than 100 years ago? And how is urbanization, which allows more human interaction, not less, a problem? (Not very many hackerspaces, art studios, research libraries, comic cons, symphonies, etc etc in rural areas).
Just throwing more people into the same small space doesn't necessarily mean that they suddenly start interacting with each other more.
In fact, the opposite can happen, where investment into local social community building stalls completely, because why even bother?
Why would you listen to ramblings you do not really care about when there is an infinite supply of new people that don't in this very moment?
That's one mechanism. There are many more.
Urbanization is good on paper, but has many shortcomings. Hypothetically, it should be the most efficient and best solution. That hypothetical just leaves out how humans actually work.
Very well written. I tend to forget how important the people around me are, and as you say, force myself to act with the "high status" intrinsic motivation.
Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day
The end result of this is either AI annihilates human value, and we become pets or are annihilated ourselves, or AI is restricted to never pass a certain level.
This really speaks to me, and Terence Tao literally wrote something very similar few days ago [1] where he advocates for a more holistic approach to intellectual fields, and the value of community building.
On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.
Amazing read. AI indeed completely annihilated every other topic. You can go to any tech conference these days and anything that isn't related to AI just feels so irrelevant. It wasn't like this at all for crypto, NFT or any other hype topic of the day.
Here's an analogy: People slowly developed skills on killing things; methods learned over thousands of hours and it is seen as a lifelong skill. These methods remain very useful for understanding the discipline of killing all of the various living things that need to be killed to sustain our modern world.
AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.
Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful.
I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."
I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.
I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.
I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.
I've been overhauling my parent's backyard. Mostly it's cleaning up decade's worth of clutter. From there there's regenerative visions for mulch, native plants, and intentional areas for humans. I'm learning a ton. What a great displacement for my creative energy with the added benefit of being physically demanding.
I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.
This was my initial reaction as well. I have been thoroughly invested in the craft of software engineering for 3+ decades. From the blog posts mentioned in the all the way back to Byte magazine at the library as a 10 year old. But those days appear to be perhaps behind us now, as suggested in the article. I am grieving it, despite the fact I have embraced LLMs for creating software.
But I refuse to use LLMs for things like making music. I like your term "purely human". There's no place for fancy statistical engines in human art. Art belongs to human communities and human culture. Which is where, apparently, I will continue to find my refuge if not my living.
I am quite pro AI for various reasons, but for this reason I just don't see low effort AI art really taking off beyond memes, corporate promotional material, and porn. The value of art is the humanity behind it. It's the reason abstract modern painting continues to be valued despite many folks finding its absolute skill level to be lower than, say, the impressionists or modernists of yore.
Yeah, it's basically like the time I was in a band where we gelled musically, I actually started writing more/better music subconsciously. And a particular type of music that would fit with the band.
I think it's not always a voluntary response. If you are involved in some kind of social situation, your mind automatically points a certain way.
If you lack an enriching situation, then your mind might just get lost !
The whole John Donne meditation the title is referencing:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee
(had to memorize it in High School, and its one of my favorites. It was written over 400 years ago and has aged quite well.)
Hemingway also borrowed the penultimate line in For Whom The Bell Tolls. I also had to memorize this back in the day but I still stop to read it whenever I see it somewhere.
Not totally related but The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost always reminds me Donne's.
The Tuft of Flowers
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
I'm also reminded if "I am a rock" by Simon and Garfunkel. Last two stanzas:
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
This poem is beautifully referenced in Mark Campbell's libretto for _As One_, an opera about the life and self acceptance of a trans woman, Hannah. Her class is also assigned the poem to study. This part destroys me every time:
*Hannah before, Hannah after, Conductor, Quartet:*
“…Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind…”
*Hannah before:*
I am the lone,
Dissenting voice
In the classroom.
I rise and declare
To a sea of non-islanders:
“It isn’t true,
I am an island.”
With all the experience
Of my fourteen years,
I see no other life
Than one apart,
Alone.
I need no one.
No one needs me.
I consigned myself
To my own island long ago.
Long ago.
I argue, and,
Satisfied by
My brilliant discourse on independence,
Sit back down.
The classroom is silent.
The teacher seems impressed.
(Or was she concerned?)
If you exclude the deep work on models themselves and just focus on use — harnesses etc. — then the intellectual community is basically prescientific. Very little meaningful empiricism. danluu's notes on benchmarks and experimental design come to mind: https://danluu.com/exercise-7/
This response confuses me, as I’m pretty sure OP is talking about AI use (i.e. applied use, from solving math problems to vibe coding to etc etc) not something like harness design or benchmarking? I’m also not sure what empiricism has to do with it, are non-scientists not intellectuals in your eyes?
Nope. There's a lot of unscientific intellectualism out there. I don't see a lot of intellectual depth in the communities springing up around AI use — I had vibecoding in particular in mind, and Fernando's blog post directly addresses mathematics.
I don't understand the contrast you're drawing. Harness design and benchmarking are major aspects of vibe coding (and solving math problems with LLMs, for that matter); I would go so far as to say harness design and benchmarking are the more intellectually serious aspects of vibecoding. Fernando is definitely aware of them as well. These just aren't meaningful substitutes for the intellectual work being diminished.
The author's contention is that the AI-in-software discourse is much less intellectual than software discourse previously was:
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I would wager that people who do mathematics for a hobby are not at all concerned about AI.
I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.
That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.
That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.
My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.
Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.
Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.
I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.
I’ve got a physics background too and have been working in SW for 20+ years. For me the angst comes from perhaps not making a living. Do you feel certain that your ”other projects” will pay the bills, or are you fortunate enough to not have to think about that? What are the ”other projects” if I may ask?
Oh, for a living, I definitely had concerns. I suspect that much of the angst in the article was about how it affects all endeavors, including hobbies. I'm pushing back on that.
The premise here is that, “software engineering is solved.” That is not a valid statement. There is nothing to, “solve.” Engineering is a practice; not a game or puzzle with a solution. It is a way of developing software.
I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.
There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.
I think the author would probably agree that the profession of software engineering still has important responsibilities in the age of agents. He says so himself about his new day-to-day role:
> In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code.
Regarding continuing to practice software engineering, it is a noble ideal, but do you have an answer to the erosion of community described in the article? For instance, do you have suggestions for the author for how they might still feel motivated to invent a new programming language?
I think there are things we can do to preserve our intellectual practice, like intentionally forming communities that only do traditional coding (much like how human-only art communities still exist), but it's useful to suggest these concretely if you have any in mind.
If you want to create a programming language, create one. Do it because you enjoy it and because you have to answer a burning question. Learn how to formalize a language. Decide on whether to do that with operational or denotational semantics. Understand IR, optimization pipelines, and all that. Every moment spent on acquiring this knowledge is not lost and the time is not wasted. You’re enriched by it!
There are other people out there doing the same thing. Share with them. They’re more than happy to find like minded people.
Choosing to give up is not the answer. Claiming that engineering is, “solved,” is promoting a false narrative. It’s almost nihilist. Defeatist at least. Don’t even admit it or repeat it. It’s just not true.
All of the crypto bros told us how inevitable their technology was. We didn’t have to argue. Their constant chirping just got annoying and now look. They’re basically gone having exhausted the well.
A lot of LLM technology is in the same boat. You have a bunch of noisy people lying and hyping up the technology to line their pockets. History will sort them out too. You don’t have to give bad arguments space.
I think the worst effect AI has had on our industry is this malaise that has settled in and convinced so many people to give up, stop contributing, and accept the future that the hype bros have made up. They’re the ones getting rid of jobs, telling everyone they’re gonna get replaced, that there’s no need to learn programming or how to do software engineering.
Software engineering is going to be more important than ever. Despite the astonished claims of the intermediate beginners that Claude one-shotted the app they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to build for six years… it doesn’t magically generate good software. It can do a lot but at the end of the day it still needs a human operator to understand its output and direct the harnesses.
The thing to watch out for is people giving up on engineering as a profession. Software has barely entered that arena. But if we start vibe coding air traffic control software, it’s probably time to stop flying.
The point of software engineering hasn’t been to generate code. It’s to understand what the heck we are building. To develop the processes, techniques, wisdom, and knowledge to direct the work. To bounce between theory and application and back again. To better ourselves and make computers do useful things.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer."
Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).
My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.
Yes, but much of it wasn’t, which was my point, as it’s simply the first case that comes to mind where we know an author demanded their unpublished work be destroyed (Terry Pratchett is another). And Kafka didn’t receive widespread recognition until after his death, when Brod started publishing his writings en masse.
Hm, but I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that Kafka is a counterexample to the need for external motivation? It's true that some of his best-known work was only published only after his death (which was against his wishes, though Brod had supposedly told him that he would not destroy his works). But he did still have external motivation, e.g. Brod encouraged him, and Kafka read aloud some of his work to his friends. Also, we should be careful about interpreting his wish to destroy his unpublished works in a certain way; much of it was unfinished, and he was kind of a perfectionist.
Indeed there are people who don't contribute to the community. Or maybe they can't find a publisher. I'm sure there are brilliant things written which will never find an audience.
But the broader point, in agreement with the article, is that the existence of fiction depends in part on extrinsic motivation (e.g. publishing, finding readers) and a community of intellectuals engaging with one another through their work. If everyone decided to stop seeking readers all of a sudden, the field would die and become a museum (mausoleum?) of former thinkers.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 55.4 ms ] threadThis on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).
The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.
Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
Because the ultra-rich people who are building and controlling most of it are using it to do exactly those things to society, because they aren't capable of sharing this planet with the rest of us equitably. Were it being used to empower humanity (instead of just a small handful of the worst of us), I'm pretty sure the "AI haters" would be a tiny minority at most (if they existed at all).
There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.
I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.
For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.
There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.
We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.
And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.
edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great
Yes! Lots.
It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff
For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration
Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.
It should be incredibly exciting. I try to find the interesting parts that I can relate to, build on, survive with. But instead it feels like an ominous, featureless thief-of-joy grey goo coming for everything.
I think this feeling crystallised when I saw someone had used it to rebuild Prince of Persia and my immediate gut reaction was quite clear: I wanted to scream “could you please just fucking leave one good thing unsullied!?”
Right now, that's the case, but I wouldn't put a Kalshi bet on it remaining that way.
I "grew up," from the days of pure Machine Code.
In Ye Days of Yore, all programmers were expected to understand a core dump, which is a printout (yes, a printout) of thousands of hex numbers, representing the memory of the server, when it crashed.
It's tempting to use this as some kind of bar of competence, but I am constantly astounded at the things that are produced by people that would absolutely freak out at a core dump.
In the early days of compiled/interpreted languages, even top-level programmers wrote in FORTRAN or BASIC. ASM was just getting its feet under it.
I think that we'll be seeing some marvelous stuff.
...as long as Skynet doesn't consider us a threat...
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
I work on my own "agentically-engineered" projects and the pursuit of certain ideas for what you're calling intrinsic motivation, and I don't particularly care if others find it interesting or even find it at all or not, because the ideas themselves are cool to me.
It's kind of like I can suddenly tinker at 2,000% efficiency and share what I'm doing, _and if someone else finds it interesting, that's cool too_
The community is reqiured for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, just over different time horizons.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:
1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).
2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.
I don’t know if I care about feeling better, exactly, I just want to know how to deal with the feelings and try not to destroy myself.
We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".
But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.
Really appreciate you going the extra mile to drive this point home.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.
I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
> I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
That's sad.
I think for me I have made a conscious decision to continue writing even though lots of writers now use AI. I also find myself gravitating towards platforms like substack which already have a network of people who value human artifacts.
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
So anything you do can and will be stolen. There's no reason for you to make anything. Thank you for reinforcing my point.
The point about cheating on tests is that an exam is supposed to prove that you have internalized knowledge and are able to reason about it adequately. Cheating means that you reproduce the output of that understanding, without actually having done the work of understanding. Chinese Room.
A bit harsh, I know, but it seems like rather a waste if we consider ourselves software people and make that our whole. If AI has replaced the need for intellectual community in software, can't we just fulfill that same need elsewhere?
Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity? May this not turn out to be an opportunity?
There's been a shift over the past while. I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.
Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.
I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.
At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.
So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.
When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.
Not the same as me having a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.
That's what we're losing.
With code, there is usually a right and wrong approach to things, and though we may find great joy in the right approach, programs are not subjective the same way a painting is.
You might have misunderstood me because of my examples—-they were really not the point.
If not a book club, fine, then why not a writing club? Anything works here, and the example is not as important as the underlying point.
With a group of people who get together every now and then to write, I would consider that meeting all the qualifications you listed: creating not consuming, plenty of opportunity for creative ideas, other professionals available to create with, longer term projects. You even mentioned this very example already, with your analogy of submitting a novel.
If you’ve lost your intellectual community or creative outlet with software, why not explore other creative outlets, ones that are truly creative and fulfilling by your standards?
It's the stakes. Sure it was fun and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately it meant something because there was a prestige that came with cultivating a skill that brought the ultimate external validation: abnormally high pay and prestige. It was the blending of those two things that made it so special. Not a soulless pursuit of money, but also not a naive pursuit of something for passion alone. You could spend your days diving deep into something fascinating and it was highly lucrative. Now it seems we're left to choose one or the other.
Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)
Do you care about the ROI of the shares in your 401k or other retirement savings? People usually tend to pick the shares and funds that earn the most.
1) Be at the top of applying AI. The frontier overestimates of how able the average person is of applying what’s possible now. I would hope that with my software I can make money for a couple of more years. I constantly test my ideas on how far I can scale them through AI and what angles could be not as easily replicated. I’m aware that the average knowledge is catching up and I’m not faster. One could argue that also the expectation of how a software works gets higher. So users have lower attention spans want customized landing pages and UX needs to be more visual intuitive. So part of the gain in downstream benefitting users.
2) You can argue very long about 1) and I have arguments for both sides. So far it works for me and the numbers are on my side, however on the other side my plan B or 2) in this case is getting ready for life outside. I’m going in front of the camera I’m improving my talking skills I’m try to learn to build things. If you want if all knowledge work is gone. It’s literally entertainment, work with your body, serving or selling. I personally like entertainment most of that.
I’ve been trying to predict and I’ve changed my mind often, so now I’m just saying I don’t really know how the world’s gonna change.
I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.
I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.
I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.
> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?
It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.
I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.
Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.
And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.
Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript. And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.
I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.
The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.
For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.
Yep, this is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say.
And to the rest, I wholeheartedly agree. My ability to build and ship has been multiplied and continues to grow and I absolutely love it. There are growing pains and things are changing quickly but I find it exciting and energized as well.
They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.
I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though. It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.
Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.
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I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.
Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.
Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.
Etc etc.
AI is often not a cause but just an accelerator.
In fact, the opposite can happen, where investment into local social community building stalls completely, because why even bother? Why would you listen to ramblings you do not really care about when there is an infinite supply of new people that don't in this very moment?
That's one mechanism. There are many more.
Urbanization is good on paper, but has many shortcomings. Hypothetically, it should be the most efficient and best solution. That hypothetical just leaves out how humans actually work.
Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day
But I think the intellectual activity will just migrate somewhere else, once all the dust has settled.
People who are intrinsically motivated will continue to be intrinsically motivated and new communities will pop up around new domains.
Coding only came into being 70 years ago. It's not some fundamental human institution.
We're all just going to have to adapt. The wheel turns.
On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.
[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185
AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.
Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."
I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.
I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.
I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.
I think this has really softened the blow for me!
I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.
But I refuse to use LLMs for things like making music. I like your term "purely human". There's no place for fancy statistical engines in human art. Art belongs to human communities and human culture. Which is where, apparently, I will continue to find my refuge if not my living.
I think it's not always a voluntary response. If you are involved in some kind of social situation, your mind automatically points a certain way.
If you lack an enriching situation, then your mind might just get lost !
I really need to deep dive Simon & Garfunkel.
In case anyone else is wondering why the meter is so awkward: It turns out that in the original this passage was prose, not poetry. Source: https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/sermons/devotions-upon...
I thought it was more of a warning, like an omen. It turns out it's closer to the Tao.
*Hannah before, Hannah after, Conductor, Quartet:* “…Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind…”
*Hannah before:* I am the lone, Dissenting voice In the classroom. I rise and declare To a sea of non-islanders: “It isn’t true, I am an island.”
With all the experience Of my fourteen years, I see no other life Than one apart, Alone.
I need no one. No one needs me. I consigned myself To my own island long ago. Long ago.
I argue, and, Satisfied by My brilliant discourse on independence, Sit back down. The classroom is silent. The teacher seems impressed. (Or was she concerned?)
I don't understand the contrast you're drawing. Harness design and benchmarking are major aspects of vibe coding (and solving math problems with LLMs, for that matter); I would go so far as to say harness design and benchmarking are the more intellectually serious aspects of vibecoding. Fernando is definitely aware of them as well. These just aren't meaningful substitutes for the intellectual work being diminished.
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.
That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.
That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.
My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.
Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.
Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.
I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.
I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.
There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.
> In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code.
Regarding continuing to practice software engineering, it is a noble ideal, but do you have an answer to the erosion of community described in the article? For instance, do you have suggestions for the author for how they might still feel motivated to invent a new programming language?
I think there are things we can do to preserve our intellectual practice, like intentionally forming communities that only do traditional coding (much like how human-only art communities still exist), but it's useful to suggest these concretely if you have any in mind.
There are other people out there doing the same thing. Share with them. They’re more than happy to find like minded people.
Choosing to give up is not the answer. Claiming that engineering is, “solved,” is promoting a false narrative. It’s almost nihilist. Defeatist at least. Don’t even admit it or repeat it. It’s just not true.
All of the crypto bros told us how inevitable their technology was. We didn’t have to argue. Their constant chirping just got annoying and now look. They’re basically gone having exhausted the well.
A lot of LLM technology is in the same boat. You have a bunch of noisy people lying and hyping up the technology to line their pockets. History will sort them out too. You don’t have to give bad arguments space.
I think the worst effect AI has had on our industry is this malaise that has settled in and convinced so many people to give up, stop contributing, and accept the future that the hype bros have made up. They’re the ones getting rid of jobs, telling everyone they’re gonna get replaced, that there’s no need to learn programming or how to do software engineering.
Software engineering is going to be more important than ever. Despite the astonished claims of the intermediate beginners that Claude one-shotted the app they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to build for six years… it doesn’t magically generate good software. It can do a lot but at the end of the day it still needs a human operator to understand its output and direct the harnesses.
The thing to watch out for is people giving up on engineering as a profession. Software has barely entered that arena. But if we start vibe coding air traffic control software, it’s probably time to stop flying.
The point of software engineering hasn’t been to generate code. It’s to understand what the heck we are building. To develop the processes, techniques, wisdom, and knowledge to direct the work. To bounce between theory and application and back again. To better ourselves and make computers do useful things.
Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).
My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.
But the broader point, in agreement with the article, is that the existence of fiction depends in part on extrinsic motivation (e.g. publishing, finding readers) and a community of intellectuals engaging with one another through their work. If everyone decided to stop seeking readers all of a sudden, the field would die and become a museum (mausoleum?) of former thinkers.