Comment by dspillett
4 days ago
> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.
Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.
There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.
It is frightening that it took only a few comments from the top of the page to the first mention of a suicide and also that it doesn't look out of place at all.
dspillett wrote that they would rather wait tables or be a hospital porter than commit actual suicide.
What else do you think will happen when you rob people of what for a very large portion of us is their feeling of self worth.
These AI characters are too busy saving the planet to care about the people.
I wonder how Hinton feels about his brainchild, I can see an Oppenheimer moment in his future and I hope that he's mentally prepared for that.
He might already be there.
“I’m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said. “The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don’t know how serious, but it’s serious.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/13/geoffrey-hin...
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> Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health
Where I work we have a 100% office policy. And while that sometimes feels hilarious, I am also somewhat glad about it because I like working and connecting with people physically.
However, as mentioned, I do notice that even though I am physically in the office most days, I spend an increasing amount of time alone on my computer and work with my agents. It’s satisfying in it’s own way, and I am definitely more productive. But it’s also worrisome. The pace of this development is picking up, and I don’t yet see where this is going exactly, or if I like where what I can see is going.
Related: We recently interviewed a candidate who worked remotely for the past 3-4 years. He said he'd be looking forward to work in the office again. I could honestly feel that he meant it, and I understand that. I guess some mix of both is the best.
Think carefully. I left high school teaching to become a dev. I would never go back. Yeah, social isolation sucks. But doing a job where your students/clients/patients think you're nothing but a waste of their time is soul-crushing on another level.
I've been thinking about it a long time. I've not been happy in Dev since 2020ish, pre-AI, it is just that AI may be the final bail of hay.
I would not go into teaching, that is something I considered earlier in life and rejected the idea of, and AI is a big thing there too, both dealing with students having it do their work and teachers using it to generate their materials.
Jobs where I'm more-or-less only dealing with people all have the “I dislike the general public” and “the pat is crap” problems, but won't have the “I'm sat on my own”, “everyone who is around me is turning into a meat relay”, and “to even just get by I'll have to interact with the giant purloining polution machines” problems.
> is soul-crushing on another level
They say a change is as good as a rest… :)
I've done sitting/standing in front of a screen for nearly three decades. I'm not looking for something I'll actually like doing to earn a living, it would be the height of naivety to even hope for that, but moving away from more & more of the same in ways I'm liking less & less might be good for me.
I don't have that experience
But my experience as a dev using AI now is that I am a waste of time, because I'm playing second fiddle to a fuckin chatbot
I want a job and career where I feel good about myself, where I feel valuable and useful, not this misery of plugging shit into the bot and listening to what it says
Yeah people here really underestimate how shitty your customers can be.