I'm not sure how this will resonate here, but this past year my interests in side projects sharply declined. For reference I am early 30s, married no kids. Up until now I used to work on 2-3 large side projects a year, diving deep into them obsessed with sleepless nights working.

Now with LLMs it just feels kind of like whats the point? Either my work will be consumed by an LLM to train and get tossed aside or i should just wait 5 years and whatever i will have worked on will probably just be a prompt away. Even if that doesn't become true, nobody really cares about traditional software building anyways. Everything is just LLMs. All interesting things about AI that I really liked building with ML or RL now just seem completely obsolete. Any mention of AI is just overwhelmed by "oh so your just connecting to ChatGPT and boom no problem, right?" with the majority of the population completely blind to the fact that there are many types of ML and other things besides an LLM.

Its just hard to get motivated by anything. Unless you are working on a LLM right now nobody really cares what you are doing in software. Just seems futile.

I think also my own personal expectations get in the way of doing side projects. Its hard to work hundreds of hours on something knowing the end monetary value is going to be $0. So I end up in this state of wanting to work on something but then getting cynical, realizing there's little to no money to be made and just demotivate myself.

Anyways that is a long rant and this past year instead of building software i started to learn an instrument. it has been great. with software there is this notion of something being "optimal" but with music there is no optimal. Even the highest level artists are not satisfied with their work. The music is always above you.