We mourn our craft

This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working at the moment.

The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate.

The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses.

I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.

I wonder whether, in the end, it was simply poor accessibility that made programmers special, and whether it is that what some of them are missing. Being special by "talking" a special language their customers can't comprehend.

Sure, they are still needed for debugging and for sneering at all those juniors and non-programmers who will finally be able to materialise their fantasies, but there is no way back anymore, and like riding horses, you can still do it while owning a car.

Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun.

And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back.

I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!

I love paying some billionaire $0.0001 to use his thinking machine / Think for me SaaS. I love my competency and speed being rented from a billionaire, removing all value of my labor and agency. I really feel sorry for all of you LLM pilled people. You need to be shamed. This is going to be used as a weapon to devalue every working persons agency in this world and remove all of the working class's bargaining chips.

You think its just SWE? It will be accountants, customer service, factory workers, medical assistance basically anyone who doesn't work with their hands directly, and they'll try to solve that here soon too and alienate them too.

Look at who's in charge, do you think they're going to give us UBI? No, they're going to sign us up to go fight wars to help them accumulate resources. Stop supporting this, they're going to make us so poor young men will beg to fight in a war. Its the same playbook from the first half of the 20th Century.

You think I'm paranoid, give it 5 years.

We are at all time high's in the stock market/equities and they've laid off 400k SWE's in the last 16 months. While going on podcasts to tell us we are going to have more time to create and do what we love. We have to work to pay our bills. We don't want whats coming, but they're selling us some lie that this will solve all our problems, it will solve the ruling classes problems that will be it. You will have no bargaining chips and you will be forced to take whatever morsels given to you.

Your competency will be directly correlated 1:1 to the quantity and quality of tokens that you can afford, given access too (or loaned??) We're literally at the beginning of a black mirror episode before it gets dark.

People that grew up in the Capitalist West have been brainwashed since they were 10 years old they they can be a billionaire too, no you can't there's 2k-3k of them and 8 billion of us.

These automation tools are the ultimate weapon for the ruling class to strip all value of you from your labor, and you're embracing that as a miracle. Its not, your life is in the process of being torn of all meaning.

Good luck to everyone who agrees, we're going to need it.. Anyone supporting these companies or helping enhance these model's capabilities, you're a class traitor and soon to be slave.

Required reading: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...

I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would teach people something, but apparently not.

Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money.

I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do? One less adversary.

I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating together… but he's acting against those interests and he's doomering and I have no more time for that.

it definitely sucks to be honest, and theres a lot of cope out there.

fact of the matter is, being able to churn out bash oneliners was objectively worth $100k/year, and now it just isnt anymore. knowing the C++ STL inside-out was also worth $200k/year, now it has very questionable utility.

a lot of livelihoods are getting shaken up as programmers get retroactively turned into the equivalent of librarians, whose job is to mechanically index and fetch cognitive assets to and from a digital archive-brain.

dude needs to chill

also:

> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.

no we won't lol wtf

but also: we will probably still have to do that anyways, but the LLM will help us and hopefully make it take less time

This just in: people who expect things to stay the same should steer clear of careers in technology. Art, too, come to think of it.

how elitist