alt Hacker NewsI would add to this that, to me and to many friends in their 30-40s, using AI models to achieve something we used our brains to achieve feels... empty? wrong? soulless? Sure, a lot of menial work can be relegated to the models, and it's ok, most of the time, but you finish a day of work with the inability to shake a precise new feeling: that you haven't really achieved something, even if you shipped more than on an average day in the past. It's frankly depressing, and it's even more depressing thinking that most people seem to absolutely disregard this feeling completely.
Replies
I don’t get this feeling, I feel like I’ve achieved so much more than I have ever achieved, everything is polished and I’m happy with it.
I’m still developing, I’m just doing more than I ever did by directing Codex.
The way I see it is the same as I saw the leap from writing code in a text editor, to using an ide with intellisense, to using the jetbrains ide’s, to using mcp’s, to now directing AI - at all of those steps I wrote code, each step less and less but still it has the same output which is it is my work - even writing in a text editor I wrote less Java (until enterprise architects got involved :) ) than C++, and than assembly.
> to me and to many friends in their 30-40s, using AI models to achieve something we used our brains to achieve feels... empty?
you have to start using AI to achieve something which was way more challenging before, then you will feel lots of fulfillment and inspiration.
I think this is where people start to consider you a "Luddite".
Is it bad that you used a computer and Google and lifted information from other people to accomplish a task?
My father is a machinist and has built has knowledge off the skills and documentation of thousands before him, is that empty?
You still have to do the actual work, and where do you draw the line on "shipping more". If a farmer now has an automated tractor, does that mean his work is now trivial?
Not manually cleansing data and building apps with AI to do the parts you can't or don't want to do is a massive lift.
I can do things that were far beyond my reach — suddenly. Almost all at once.
"Now you can discover you suck at marketing and business" :D
I can relate, but it's our turn of the wheel it seems.
It's a phenomenon that's happened basically nonstop since the Enlightenment. Yeaterday it was John Henry, today it's you.
Time to find a new hobby to bring intellectual satisfaction if typing "do my job" over and over in a text box isn't doing it.
Inversely I am building things I either never would have gotten to and a rate that would have taken infinitely longer. I get excited every day because instead of so much of my day spent writing the boiler plate I can spend most of the time around the architecture.
I feel like this: "working" with AI is fucking depressing.
No, I do not have an unshakeable feeling of not really having achieved anything at the end of the day.
Consequently I do not feel depressed or have to disregard any feelings.
I am busy working on my project. It is still hard to ship good software, even if the implementation is mostly getting done by itself.
My code was always plumbing. Glue stuff together. Connect data model to api.
I'm still using my brain, just doing a lot more plumbing now and reading a lot more code than writing. Depressing in some ways and exciting in others. At the end of the day it's not going way. It's disruptive and better to embrace it.
Those of us in our 50s have been waiting for this day since Eliza.
I also feel this, and it also troubles me. Unfortunately, we may be in the minority on this site.
What the other replies seem to overlook is that it fundamentally changes the nature of the work - it’s not the next step in the evolution after an IDE, it is closer to an automated tractor, and yes that does make the farmer’s work trivial. Pressing a button and having the field get plowed is a very different experience than manually plowing a field yourself. I can no longer in good conscience say “I plowed that field”, because all I did was press a button. The tractor plowed that field.
Most people on this site seem to feel comfortable claiming “I plowed that field” after they pressed the button that started the automated tractor. Okay, you had the idea to press the button - but you didn’t actually do the work, you delegated it. Same end result, but a different lived experience. Now would I rather actually plow a field by hand or simply press a button? You can probably guess - but the two actions do differ greatly in the experience they bring me, and the feelings of satisfaction.