Comment by dofm
1 day ago
Luckily I needed a new laptop and I bought an M1 Max secondhand from a friend quite cheaply because it was fast enough to recompile something else I am interested in.
So for me, there is no additional hardware cost; it was acquired in replacement.
I run the AI models at home on this kit because I want to; I'll use openrouter if I need to.
I accept the economics of this article are right. But I feel so incredibly sad about this outcome that we're now just to be people caretaking machines that do the job we loved that actually I am not sure that exercising this nuance is going to matter in the long term.
It turns out it is a mistake I have made in my life — now really unfixable because I am a bit too old — to believe that I will always find enough fulfilment in my work to offset the absence of personal fulfilment elsewhere; I have always enjoyed being able to help people directly by doing a thing I love and I am good at, and that has kept away the sadness of finding it difficult to build a conventional family life to enjoy.
I assumed I would always find some new way to find that enjoyment, but even the slim enjoyment from being able to explore this stuff on my own kit in my own terms will not be enough if the pendulum does not swing back towards human effort.
It is a dismal world we have made for ourselves. Lately I have found myself dreading growing too much older in it.
You sound awesome. Just venting? (b/c curious if friends can fill your heart abundantly, & we know we're never too old to make new friends!)
> dreading
Even avoiding political headlines (OK, at least articles), plenty of cause for dread, so I keep re-focusing to avoid despair. Easier said than done innit!
Can't kill my hope for the future though. One day, all the good stuff shall prevail (morality, intelligence, love & kindness)... maybe not permanently, but a Star Trek future is there somewhere (& they had their troubles but it wouldn't be a dreadful situation overall). Sharing with you in case it's even slightly contagious!
I must say I am not quite just venting. I have been struggling severely with burnout for a couple of years and as I work to fix it by myself ultimately, and get back who I was, the awful thing is finding out that the industry is so utterly and completely different anyway.
So in my fight back I decided that I needed to re-centre myself; learn how these tools can help me personally return to productivity, try to get that deep self-teaching back, reanimate myself consistent with my principles, learn and make things. Take it head on without losing who I was.
I haven’t been a “big projects” developer since the dot com era (when I worked on some pretty cutting edge things). I have been a small projects developer: building things that matter for small businesses and schools, supporting designers, teaching people stuff along the way. I have been productive, I have very diverse skills and I have been valued.
What I have come back to is an industry that has abandoned craft principles or discussions about developer discipline, code quality, efficiency, robustness, resilience, etc., and fully organised itself into a headlong rush towards a kind of nihilistic Metropolis machine-cranking.
And because I am a freelancer (more of a contractor in practice), my competition is already the machine itself. I am one of those developers who is eliminated in the last sentence of the article. I am not needed on big projects and in many small jobs — the kind a burned out small business developer needs to get back to work — I will never be needed again.
It is very odd, trying to learn how to understand the tools that others are using to make you irrelevant.
And when all your friends are obsessed with AI, either clients desperate to use it or friends (in the creative culture I am surrounded by away from work) angry and resentful of it, I find I have just nobody to talk this through with.
In many ways I would rather not have returned to actively using HN (because articles and despair, and because being by oneself it’s possible to get drawn into online arguments) but in recent months I have noticed in the comments that perhaps this is the only place where these discussions among “craft” developers are happening at all.
I am over fifty and safe financially, and if my last day were for some horrible reason out of my control to be tomorrow, that’s OK; I have enjoyed my life and on good days I do still enjoy it. I have friends who I see when I can get myself out of the house, I have distractions I can enjoy, all that.
I am now much more troubled by what it is going to be like to continue to live it. I struggle every day to see where I have value, especially as burnout has left me with less energy to spend.
Like I say, I am safe and very aware I have been blessed; it’s not a cry for help. But I think a lot of us who found value in our work wonder what the fuck we can do to keep ourselves alive the way we were.
ETA: holy shit that was an essay.
I'm younger, but not by much and I too feel instinctively sad by how abruptly the entire industry has changed. And there's no going back. It's because I'm a craftsmen, I care about the code. And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context.
I care about the code because the code is the product interface to the people working on it, my peers and team. The UX around that code affects us every day, every hour. We should care about it! It took me a decade to realize caring about the code is not bad, it's just a dualism we have to hold: two truths. The code is a means to an end, the outcome and end-user value is the only thing that matters, it's true! Also the code matters. The code is a manifestation of the effort and human attention toward an interface that becomes a product that produces business value for people.
Writing code is changed forever. And I'm saddened by it because I spent so much intimate time and attention writing code. I felt proud and it was beautiful to me, the code itself, the APIs created, and the end user state. (I'm a product developer, and believe it or not, I even enjoy CSS). But also the code is just code. AI writes code. And everyone is rightfully so losing their minds over it all. My hours "coding" are changed forever.
But I fully believe the pendulum will swing back to what has always been true. It's not a failure of AI. It's just what has always been true: creating useful and usable product experiences, for people, is hard. It's a very hard iterative feedback loop with experiential, tacit, actions and actors in real life.
So I think, we're ok. The variance is high and wild, but, it's all good, it's all still ok.
Thanks for your writing, I enjoyed it. (edit: TLDR I think you're product person caught in backend-dev circles. Human-centric, make things for people. In this world, AI is more obviously a tool. On the other side of the pool, the more backend-heavy the dev, the more everything is just one skill file away: marketing, sales, UX, design, writing, strategy, consciousness.)
2 replies →
This was very touching to read, thank you for writing this dofm. I feel the same in a lot of ways. -toilet
So basically you don't have a life outside of the job?
> now really unfixable because I am a bit too old
How old is a bit too old? I know 50+ colleagues doing sports and traveling just fine.
> So basically you don't have a life outside of the job?
I very much did. A big social life. I may have had more of a social life than most, in fact; I have been so lucky.
But that doesn't change that I am the kind of person who drew a lot of self-worth from being able to use my skills to help people, which was actually what helped me find that life in the first place.
As I mentioned elsewhere I have been dealing with really profound burnout for a couple of years. It is extremely difficult. It has made it distressing to try to cope with busy social environments; I am not hiding but life has changed and other people's lives move on. (Including other freelancers you work with.)
Without a sense of engagement from what I do for a living, I am left with a lot less of a life. And the world of tech has changed in so many ways in just the time I have been trying to recover that it feels difficult to find a place again. It is taking an enormous amount of mental energy to catch up when I have sometimes only been able to focus for about an hour in any three days.
Lately things have been better, and while I am AI-cynical I have been enjoying digging into a new topic and working out what I think, but doing this past the age of fifty when you're burned out is hard work.
> How old is a bit too old?
I was talking about rethinking priorities and really seeking a family life for myself there, and the answer is that I am enough over fifty that there is no fair way to approach that, given my current mental health.
Some things, I'm afraid, do just one day stop being possible. You may not get a do-over after, say, forty-five.
Ironically it used to be the case that best developers who actually were able to accomplish something were gradually promoted to management. HArdcore developers who really loved coding were resisting that but there was a pressure definitely. And it makes sense managers are better managers if they know more about the tasks they are managing.
Now every developer is getting promoted to management because they are expected to manage the AI-agents. But their status in the organization nor pay does not really increase does it when every coder is doing that.
One of the metaphorical questions I have been pondering lately, is this:
How interchangeable are shepherds?
Not a question that demands answers in this thread, obviously.
I hope you can find joy again. People like you, who value the human side, are needed in this world. I agree that in recent years it has been going the wrong way, but to change it we have to work together.
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