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Agreed. I haven't written a line of code since last November when AI had the big shift into something good.

The average HNer would imagine me scrolling TikTok while I periodically swivel to Claude to type "continue" while my brain shrivels away.

That I can delegate lower level work like implementation means I spend my time at increasingly high leverage positions like deciding what gets built. And any time I want, I can get as granular and inquisitive as I'd like about the lower level work. After all, I probably chose it from a multiple choice AskUserQuestion tool call, each with a blurb and shortlist of trade-offs.

All this talk of de-skilling doesn't make a lot of sense to me because what are these skills people covet so much that defined most of the day to day of a software developer? What, the implementation details of some framework or the intimate details of your company's crappy legacy software stack?

Dunno, I have bigger plans for myself than that.

That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.

> It is, but why is that a problem?

I used to have several good answers, but now I use Claude for everything, I can't remember any

>then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.

1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.

2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.

>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise

I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.

Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.

I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

>we can definitely regulate incentives.

We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.

Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.

> But the US chose not to

Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.

> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.

>We can't regulate incentives.

We call tax subsidies "tax incentives" for a reason. You subsidize high-fructose corn syrup, you incentivize society to include cheap oils in their food.

>the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals

On a domestic level this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how cheaply China makes corn syrup if there's still a cost of importing it into your country. And if it's still a problem, you add tariffs for more (dis)incentive. That was the original way they were supposed to be implemented, not as this massive general tax on doing any business with a country.

And if it's still a problem despite that, direct regulations and bans from usage in market consumption products is a last option. We can , do, and have done all of these for hundreds of ingredients.

>Then US can be the survivor in this global race

I'm talking specifically about food here, you know? You were so focused on the obesity epidemic that I wanted to highlight the actual underpinnings of it instead of leave it at "the world got lazier and fatter, that's progress".

Clearly tariffs don't so much to software. AI needs different solutions.

>AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.

If AI is a societally damaging tool, then I see this as a win. Let them move, let the US economy correct back to rationalism again, and let's improve society instead of CEO's bottom lines.

I also do believe in the invisible hand. If big tech doesn't like potential US regulations, smaller startups will happily compete for that role in the country.

> I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.

Note: nearly all of the western hemisphere has obesity rates of >25%. Obesity is also high in the Middle East and Australia/NZ.

The US, with an obesity rate of >40%, is exceptionally obese, but it's not correct to say that obesity is mainly a US problem. It's quickly becoming a worldwide problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#/media...