muldvarp

It's not even that enjoyable to review AI slop all day. So it's a brief and unejoyable era before the long and miserable era.

> don't you see the futility of complaining about it?

I'm not complaining to stop this. I'm sure it won't be stopped. I'm explaining why some people who work for a living don't like this technology.

I'm honestly not sure why others do. It pretty much doesn't matter what work you do for a living. If this technology can replace a non-negligible part of the white collar workforce it will have negative consequences for you. You don't have to like that just because you can't stop it.

> This didn’t fully come out of the blue. We have been told to expect the unexpected.

It absolutely did. Five years ago people would have told you that white collar jobs where mostly un-automatable and software engineering was especially safe due to the complexity.

> To me it's like a halfway step toward management. When you start being a manager, you also start writing less code and having a lot more conversations.

I didn't want to get into management, because it's boring. Now I got forced into management and don't even get paid more.

It's because I still need to earn a living and this technology threatens my ability to do so in the near future.

It also significantly changes my current job to something I didn't sign up to.

> Still, it is noticeable that with many of the AI companies claiming that their version of "AGI" is just around the corner, developers and staff don't appear to be particularly excited about this

Why would they be excited about it? There's little in it for them.

Nobody that has to work for a living should be excited for AI, they should be genuinely afraid of it. AGI will have vast, deeply negative consequence for almost everyone that has to work for a living.

Was there? Software has always been a "speed of delivery over correctness" discipline. LLMs will just crank that up to 11.

The underlying assumption here is that you won't have to earn a living anymore. Unless you already own enough to keep living off of it, you'll still have to work. That work will just suck more and pay less.

Robots scale much worse than knowledge work.

But yes, I'm not bullish on trades either. Trades will suck as well when everyone tries to get into them because it's the only way to still earn a living.

Ok. Can you explain why?

There seems to be zero reason for anyone to invest any time into learning anything besides trades anymore.

AI will be better than almost all mathematicians in a few years.

Compete for what exactly? Under the assumption that AI agents will make human software engineering obsolete there won't be a market for you to compete in. Everyone that wants a piece of software will ask their AI agent to create it.

My ability to create software is only really useful to me because other people pay me for it. If AI agents take that from me, it won't matter that I can now create awesome software in minutes instead of weeks. The software was never really the thing that was useful for me.

> We need more of this kind of optimization.

Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).

AI will fuck over anyone that works for a living. Only the people owning stuff for a living will profit off AI.

Trades aren't safe. Even if nobody figures out how to automate trades, the amount of people that will go into trades when white collar jobs are automated away will drive wages down.

AI will be the worst thing to happen to society in a very long time.

I did like the (short) LLM-free part of my career. The bait-and-switch refers specifically to the changes due to the introduction of LLMs. Any career where LLMs don't play a big role would not have been a bait-and-switch.

That said, I don't understand the point of "what if nothing ever works out for you?"-type questions. What do you expect me to answer here? That I'm secretly a wizard and with the flick of my magic wand I'll make something work out?

I genuinely feel like I got bait-and-switched by computer science. If I could go back and study something different I would do it in a heartbeat.

Sadly, there's very little I can do now. I don't have the financial means to meaningfully change careers now. Pretty much the only thing I could do now that pays somewhat well and doesn't require me to go to university again is teaching. I think I will ride this one out and end it when it ends.

> AI mostly doesn’t produce adequate quality or correctness for the type of code I enjoy writing.

This assumes that companies care about "code quality" and customers care about bugs.

> If you find coding boring, explore the frontiers. You will find a lot of coding wilderness where no AI has trod.

There are a lot of software engineers and not a lot of frontier.

LLMs destroying Wikipedia would be incredibly sad and is one of the things that makes me think that LLMs will have a strong negative impact on the lives of most people.

I think people in the cs bubble will be optimistic up until it directly affects them by destroying software engineering as a (good) career.

> There is absolutely a market for social media that bans AI slop.

I fully agree, I just don't know how that could work.

I think GenAI will kill the internet as we know it. The smart thing is (and always has been) to be online less and build real connections to real people offline.

It's the explicitly stated goal of several of the largest companies on the planet which put up a lot of money to try to reach that goal. And the progress over the past few years has been stunning.

I think there is only a very narrow band where LLMs are good enough at producing software that "hand-coding" is genuinely dead but at the same time bad enough that (expensive) humans still need to be paid to be in the loop.

I think in a few years, we will realize that LLMs have impacted our lives in a deeply negative way. The relatively small improvements LLMs bring to my life will be vastly outweighted by the negatives.

If LLM abilities stagnate around the current level it's not even out of the question that LLMs will negatively impact productivity simply because of all of the AI slop we'll have to deal with.

Inference is not that expensive. I'd argue that most models are already useful enough that people will pay to run them.

The internet was world changing and the dotcom bubble was still a bubble.

The fact that software quality plays zero role in commercial software engineering is one of the reasons why I think LLMs will easily eat our lunch. Bugs simply don't matter.

The software engineering grass is getting really brown really fast. The grass on the other side will be greener (not green, greener) soon.

Now imagine a recent graduate, deep into debt, seeing all opportunities to pay off that debt vanishing before their eyes.

No one is claiming that any of the alternatives are better jobs than software engineering has been for the last 20 years.

We don't live in the last 20 years anymore and software engineering is either becoming a different (worse) job or simply vanishing.

I feel like the rug was pulled from under me.

I'm currently looking into other professions, but the future looks bleak for most kinds of knowledge work.