Comment by FinnLobsien
7 hours ago
I think emotions are an underrated aspect to the "AI changes how we work" thing. Everyone I know extensively uses AI in most parts of their work. Basically everyone has multiplied their output by a lot.
But I don't know many people who say they enjoy their work more because of AI. I definitely resonate with the pain of watching something that required so many little bits of knowledge you earned over years melt into pushing a button.
I might just be the artisan cobbler watching factories rise during the industrial revolution. Making good boots was and is still hard and requires a lot of specific knowledge, but the amount of people appreciating well-made boots plummeted as factor-made, cheaper boots flooded the market.
And I know, rationally, that the line of "what is hard" is just moving. There are great industrially-made goods the same way there are great products whose code is mainly AI-generated. Like good boots, building safe, scalable, distributed systems is still hard.
But I can't help but have some nostalgia for how things were pre-AI. Work felt more honest, the skills I spent years building felt more valuable, and I was more satisfied at work.
I enjoy my work much more with AI. My least favourite parts of software engineering are the parts that AI is the best at. Never again will I have to manually insert ten debug statements, or git bisect to figure out where an issue started, or fix a dozen merge issues that are obvious but tedious. These aren't even the thinking parts of AI, though I do use those too. Just the mechanical tedious work that Haiku could do make my workday so much easier.
“But I can't help but have some nostalgia for how things were pre-AI. Work felt more honest, the skills I spent years building felt more valuable, and I was more satisfied at work.”
I am 25 but as someone who came into this field very passionate and competent, this was my initial reaction and it sat uncomfortably with me for many months. I still have nostalgia (mainly from a younger age). On work feeling more honest, I think this is a result of an institutional attack on software engineering rather than a new reality of these tools. Like what happens to many other labor forces in history as you mention with artisan cobblers. In some ways it is a consequence of technology but it definitely also weaponized to hurt labor and consolidate power.
In the case of AI-assisted coding, this manifests in a culture of distrust and disrespect toward engineers, both from the bottom-up and top-down. Managers will devalue their engineers by using AI to bypass them. Peers and reports will use AI to exaggerate progress in lockstep with management. No is no longer an easy vocabulary choice when dealing with power because previously technical prowess was definitive, now it can be made “advisory”. I think this is very wrong and stupid but the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent or something like that.
I still think it is though, that technical knowledge is still supreme. Maybe this is a cope but I find AI tooling very empowering (minus the walled garden nature of it which can be mitigated through local usage but this is problematic in its own regard). Management, pundits, and tech CEOs can frame it however they want but I feel more technically capable than at any point of my technology journey. Not at work, not in academia, but objectively from me knowing myself. We can do more in less time if we know what to do.
I think your take is very balanced and true. I've also never felt as technologically capable as I do now.
I guess the most annoying part to me is the expectation of producing a multiple of the output in the same time, when what I really enjoy is the process of slowly making things.
> I still think it is though, that technical knowledge is still supreme.
Ultimately, the ability to get results is what matters most. I've seen quite a few AI maximalists who have Claude mass-produce a bunch of things that nobody needs and then have something running on autopilot that doesn't need to be running in the first place.
The problem with this thinking is that every shoe cost effort to make. Software takes that much effort to make once, and then it can be duplicated for free whether it's awesome or crap. It isn't the same economics.
That's true. Although how the product is sold doesn't necessarily affect how we enjoy working on it imo.
You can love writing code and working on tricky projects the same way you can love hand-making boots.
You can love managing an agent swarm the same way you can love managing a shoe factory.
I was talking about enjoyment of the work, not the economics of it.