Post-AI Programming
Now that thinking about every detail of your application and writing it by hand is a thing associated with boomers and a time when people could still afford to buy a home, programming sure isn’t all that fun anymore.
The fulfillment I used to get from creating something is fleeting, and instead I spend my days yelling at the prompt machine, trying to manipulate it into being a passable software engineer, but just like yelling at your fridgerator doesn’t make it be a better fridgerator, neither does it have much of an effect here.
Reviewing code is the part of this job that most developers I know like the least, so it now becoming the main part of the job sure isn’t exciting. Not to mention that it’s even worse than that, because whenever I review the code and come to the conclusion that it’s an absolute abonimation, I often have to clean it up myself, because sometimes AI gets stuck in some scizo-loop of doom, and keeps producing the same exact result when I keep asking it to unfuck the thing it created.
I realize that I’m the sort-of guy who likes the process of creating things, not so much the end result, and because the process is now replaced with being a glorified self-checkout registry manager in a grocery store, I no longer really learn new things nearly as well as when I actually created things myself. Intelligence stagnation here I come!
Of course I keep working on my side projects without agentic programming, to avoid getting a full-blown brainworm that’ll make me be content and who knows, maybe even make me say that Microsoft ain’t all that bad, but I don’t even want to publish my projects anymore, because sure enough the AI will just steal them.
Sure is great I made it to a senior level before this became a thing because I don’t foresee any juniors or even mid-levels getting hired for much longer anymore, now that senior is the only level left. Heck, we might as well start calling ourselves AI managers at this point, and do away with the whole software engineering thing in its entirety.
This is of course great for the AI companies, because the programming I used to do was entirely free, and only required electricity and some text editor, now I have to pay for tokens to create things, so that the billionare psychopaths could build their cozy little doomsday bunkers, a day we’re all surely working towards making a reality.
But don’t listen to me, I’m just a AI-doomer. Surely this will all be for the better somehow, and I’m just too set in my ways to see it.
All hail our AI overlords
Whether you like it or not, AI is here, and is being forced down our throats on a daily basis. You can probably tell from my wording that I don’t like it, but it doesn’t matter what I like, as long as the shareholder value keeps going up.
Shareholder value goes up by fucking over the consumer in a plethora of ways, such as having the consumer bare the cost of running those huge data centers by having the increased water and electric demand subsidized by the general public as their utility costs go up.
Or in all consumer electronic devices requiring any RAM having their cost increased by up to 50%, while consumer-available RAM itself is in some cases 3x the price it was, because the AI juggernauts have bought up all available RAM supply. This all in hopes that soon enough those same shareholders manage to achieve their holy grail of the promised AGI, so that after they take away all your money, they can finally take away your jobs as well. The capitalists wet dream.
Look, there are definitely good things to AI, but it’s hard to get excited about those things when the AI overlords CEO’s quite literally campaign for the demise of the working class as some holy grail they are about to achieve, and not understanding why the general public is not clapping along, yelling praise at every turn.
And because they are so far removed from reality, they think that in their proposed dystopian future, the rest of us will just be able to live life without needing any money or food, despite there being zero efforts made into figuring that out, so really what’s likely to happen is just a global economic meltdown where hundreds of millions of people (billions?) go homeless and die, while they break open an ice cold beer in their doomsday bunker.
It’s likely that no human will even actually read this blog post, but instead an AI summary on Google, because even content creators get a raw deal by AI stealing their work and giving nothing back, as in this new modern age copyright apparently doesn’t mean anything anymore, and so of course many folks will cease to create anything public because their creation will just be immediately stolen from them.
To make my bitterness towards this entire topic even worse: I’m one of the people who is helping this dystopian future come to life, by either directly or indirectly working on making AI tooling better. I love my job, it has a lot of challenging problems to solve, but it’s just hard for me to find a narrative in my mind in which I’d be able to be content with things, because I’m not able to see a future where all this works out in a positive way.