This is the exact same thing that happened with luddites, which today we know as 'idiots who oppose technological progress' thanks to capitalist propaganda.

It was never about efficiency, quality, quantity, or accessibility. It's almost exclusively about getting people to stop doing things for themselves, and instead rely on expensive machinery owned exclusively by the capitalist class for everything.

Most average people used to make and fix their own clothing, which meant they had little need for corporations that produce the same clothing, but lower quality. So capitalists forced everyone to use machines, until nobody remembered how to make clothes without them.

Same with software, languages, and a lot of other skills and office jobs right now. Educated people who know how to do stuff are not only unprofitable, but also dangerous. Make them all use AI until they forget everything and have to rely on megacorporations for the tiniest thing.

This is all the more reason to keep reading books, learning, DIY as much as possible, coding your own software, and even learning stuff like woodworking, sewing, farming, etc.

Being educated, informed, knowledgeable, and skilled is among the easiest, but at the same time most effective acts of resistance.

Do not let them turn you into mindless slaves.

OP, im really quit sympathetic to you here. In among the knowledge workers who haven't been fully replaced yet, but I've done some of the training meant to replace me. It'll be a little while, but not that long, before I'm nearly unemployable.

The only solice here is the gift of limited forewarning. We can see the writing on the wall. Cobblers, per an example in another comment, didn't see it coming. We have precedent set, including manufacturing sector jobs outsourced to counties with cheap labor, to look at, only 30 years ago! You can fight it and hope to be within a small group of privileged few who knew the right people, or you can tell you kid to pivot now and get ahead of the decade of traffic and sad "wha-wha-whaaaat?" that will inevitably follow. It's not an easy choice.

I'm not sure what records and stories exist from these past eras that we can read and apply to now. Maybe a book of those tales is an opportunity for catharsis and reflection in the current moment.

All I can do is wish you luck and good judgement as this brave new world forms around us.

It will cause a massive loss of human knowledge, nobody would learn how because it's just a prompt

And it's not only for coding. Yesterday I was shown that because they probably stole a lot of parametric designs Claude can even do 3d files from photos and quotes, it spits out an openscad file and compiles it. I was shocked, it added chamfering and small details, from a rough sketch photo. Who's going to learn how to use a cad program if it can be done in 3 minutes from a prompt? And the process of learning taught you all the quirks , but in the future who's going to be a pro?

A shovel stuck in the ground does not move earth until it is used to move ground.

We are currently stuck in being amazed that the shovel goes so quickly and deep, now we must reckon how to make it move what it wrought.

This is how I feel too. I'm in several work chats where everyone seems to be pretending that Claude doesn't have its arm shoved up their ass, wielding them like a puppet.

Several of the projects I am working with are just AI generated. In fact, if I need to suggest any fixes, they will be denied unless it's AI generated.

I'm tired. I'm depressed. I used to take so much pride in solving problems, but all of that is gone now.

I'm going to try to ride it out and see where it takes me, but the work is mind numbingly boring and the trades look better and better every day.

Keep holding on. LLMs are still in the operate-at-a-loss-to-control-the-market stage. Once they start charging the real cost, human software engineers will be more in demand. That and refocus. All of human history is careers reinventing themselves as new tools become available.

In my experience that's only been the case for functionally non-unique software.

At my job we write software that's effectively unique. There isn't a pattern to fall back on.
It makes a lot more mistakes very frequently, since the nature of it keeps trying to guide it to the known path. It's great for debugging since the manner that some check failed is chasing through known logic, and it doesn't matter that it doesn't see the existing code as probable or fitting a known pattern if the shape of a switch statement is still the same.

In my personal projects I've even run into issues getting it to do stuff like vulkan synchronization barriers in a way that doesn't continuously devolve into what you see in tutorials, with an ultimately unstructured pile of adhoc resource allocation and barriers.

I'm finishing my thesis in software engineering and at this point it's hard to justify it. 6 years of my life pretty much wasted. At least I don't have any debt

Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process

maybe as a professional and a computer scientist you should have already made sure that this is not the case or warned your stake holders that this is an inherent risk

sounds like your job has not disappeared quite yet

Well, just today I had 3 meetings with different AWS techs about why a policy wasn't working or why users couldnt use certain services. Turns out all of them used AI to generate the aws policy they tried to use and the policies were wrong. The techs were rookies and lacked the understanding needed to correct the code. I was able to fix each and rewrite policies by hand.

Now when I and the rest of my greybeard generation start to retire, the rookies coming in will not have the exposure to code, policies, etc that we had. The knowledge gained from trial and error will disappear with the retirees. That's when the crisis will really begin. When we in the know will not be around to correct the rookie mistakes.

here i am in the game industry watching practically the entire industry move overseas. I've given up.

I am for some reason reminded of glass making by this. If you wanted glassware a long time ago it came from people that made it by hand, the glass blowers. Industrial methods were invented and made a big chunk of industry obsolete. But years and years later some people still want to know how to hand blow glass, learn how, then market it to people who want hand made stuff. It is pretty niche, but does still exist, and the factory made stuff does not compare.

I feel like I see one of these posts every three months or so, and it's just beginning to feel like meaningless doomposting, like the boy who cried LLM.

I don't care how carefully the code gets reviewed, you don't know it as well as if you had actually written it, and that will make all the difference three months from now when someone discovers a bug in your code (there's always a bug in the code), or when the customer comes out of left field with a feature request that you didn't forsee and isn't easy to just add in (the customer always wants what you haven't accounted for).

Don't give up hope. Don't let the clankers win. Continue to hone your craft. We will need senior devs more than ever after the AI bubble pops.

Tokens are still insanely underpriced, especially on these bigger models/projects.

Look at what you can do locally with a couple of 5090's. That's probably what's reasonable at the moment.

They're currently sending through tokens in batches to clusters running balls to the walls but the cost is WAY higher than the $20 a mon you can get for Claude or midjourney.

We may find a happy medium after a pretty sharp collapse where AI assist development is somewhere in between you writing your own loops and you just rubber-stamping something else's code.

I just don't understand why any programmer would let go of the fun stuff. The problem solving, the language learning... It's all just sad. I'll never use LLM to code simply because I enjoy coding.

Here is a new mission for all the Post-LLM-Depression existential crises developers:

Community Computing.

Use your skills to build a network with big tech alternatives for your community! Federate your network with other likeminded people’s networks. Restart the internet with real people without bots, ai agents, or advertisers.

Don’t quit your passion! Use it as fuel to motivate yourself and help others move away from big tech!

Tbh I legitimately do not buy this. I use the best models, top of the line harness and the code still sucks it sucks less granted, but it's still just not good lol.

If I'm ever in the situation that "typing the code" was a bottle neck instead of figuring out what to type then I know I've fucked up somewhere.

The problem with all of this is that nobody understands how the code actually works anymore. Yeah the focus has shifted more toward design which may not be a bad thing but the underlying functionality is just totally not understood.

The job hasn't died. How you do it has. Your job was never to write code. Your job was to understand problems and transform data.

I really worry about this. It is not my area of expertise by any means. I assume that it is acceptable at coding because the people making it have shoved every line of code they could scrape from the internet (and probably other places) into it. So it can reproduce approximate code to do anything that has been done before. But I worry it can't do anything in a new way. It can't innovate. If no one is writing code that is able to actually think about the code and understand how code works, then we as a species can't innovate anymore either. If it all goes LLM, then we've built every lego shape we will ever make and anything we build from now on has to be able to be built from the bricks we already have.

I worry we are watching the early stages of a technological dark age wash over society.