Comment by nusl
20 hours ago
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
Yeah, if this is going to be a nuclear bomb for software developers, imagine what it's going to be like for people in customer service, account managers, etc.
Yeah, I suppose I limited it to software devs since this is HN, but other industries will definitely be hit harder.
I guess factory workers felt it when robots started appearing, and there are many other similar examples of tech eating entire classes of worker. Except we're so deep in this coding rabbit hole that I dunno where else we end up.
If all you know is code, where do you go?
don't worry! you can get a few insecure part-time jobs in the retail and/or services industries, and perhaps supplement your meager income with the gig economy TM
Are you criticizing the folks championing AI while… effectively championing the AI? What do you think people should do?
I honestly have no idea. We're stuck either way. I don't know what to do. What do you do if all you know is code and you're helping yourself out of a job whether you like it or not?
If you don't use AI you'll fall behind. If you do, you're accelerating your own redundancy.
I wouldn't consider myself a champion for AI. If you read my comment history you'll see that. I don't preach its wonders or pretend that we're all happy-fluffy in this world of ours. I mostly write my own code, use AI for review and to handle the trivial boring bits. I do use AI to build random tools I'd never want to take time away from "real" work to build, like helper scripts, nice TUIs for manual processes, etc. I do recognise the irony though.
I can sympathize. If you feel you’re in limbo, emotionally, and feel helpless, it’s natural. I’m in the same profession and what you’re experiencing is not unthinkable but sometimes depending on one’s life conditions, everything might seem more daunting than it should. I believe talking to a professional about this may help. I’d do the same.
One thing I can say is that if we, as a collective of white collar workers gonna lose our jobs fast, then I wouldn’t fret much because it won’t be on me alone to fix it, it’ll be a large chunk of humanity’s problem. Revolutions and uprisings have ensued far less dire situations.
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Yeah it’s pretty much over.