I have a hard time seeing how any other white-collar job can be as worried as software development. No other industry has the straight up replacement of their work, at a level, quality, and speed, that AI coding is. AI agents are literally better (when you factor time) than even some of the best developers I've known in my career. It's over.
Probably not exactly as worried, but given software development was the first industry seriously targeted by the labs, and given the mission of nearly every startup these days is "automate the entire workflow of X knowledge work role with AI", I can see why they would still find the near-term outlook bleak.
Have you used Claude to do system administration? Networking? It's definitely not just software guys that should be worried. And then there's management -- several layers of management can just go away.
> it's a mistake. Nihilism is a dead end (or political cynicism/fatalism, whatever you want to call it).
As someone deep in nihilism and political cynicism, I can concur, this is no real solution.
The problem is I don't believe leaning into that world is a solution either, and anyone who says otherwise, sounds like my boomer parents who have Fox news streaming on their 80" TV that they update every year, in their 4500 sqft home.
I mean this genuinely and not to stoke a fire, comments advocating for leaning into the political world really feel naive and perhaps generational. Most younger people have a damn near impossible time feeling anything other than dread and sadness when thinking about the state of politics.
I'd love to have a genuine reason to be hopeful, but regardless of which party you believe in, it feels like we're all circling the drain here.
I was deeply cynical about politics until I joined a party. The idiots hid when I was around. The boomers in the nomination commitee were throwing posts at me. It was surrealistic and nothing like I imagined. Then I realized something even worse. There are no cabal of idiots. The older generation is not holding on to power. (YMMV ofc). It is some sort of deeper systematic problem with disengagement. And the angry mob knocking on the door really are idiots.
Yes. Straight up no roadblocks in two years. County level. I assumed I would have to fight tooth and nail for years and be manouvered out by some old guard all the time. It was nothing like I imagined.
Disengagment among voters and inactive party members towards active party members.
Trying to get engagement is like pulling teeth. You could be in a commitee deciding a thing, inviting the public to a meeting discussion how the thing should be done. Some of the few who show up complain that you are not changing the thing and just talk. Then you change the thing and suddenly, when it is too late to change the decision without a lot of hassle, there is way more discussion about the thing and complaints on how it is done, from people that are not aware of the trade offs or prior discussion or the whole picture.
Very frustrating. (Be aware of that the story is somewhat hyperbolic to make a point. Also, yes, Goomba fallacy).
I think the main problem is that way too few people are active in politics compared to way back. There are like no channels to reach out and too little every day discussions.
I think the "what" is way less important than the "how". I think "how to live a fulfilling life" has general principles that apply to everyone, but the results of applying those principles are different for everyone.
I think the core of it is: following my intuitive sense of "rightness" across time scales (seconds to decades). When I'm doing it, I feel peace, joy, contentment, and my life seems meaningful. When I'm not doing it, I feel dissatisfied, restless, and nihilistic.
I'm frustrated by how vaguely and abstractly I'm conveying this. But this intuitive rightness thing precedes language. It's like a bodily sense or an emotion, but deeper. Have you ever put a t-shirt on backwards and only noticed because something didn't feel right? Then you take it off and put it on the right way around, and it just feels right. It's a bit like that but for life in general.
I can give some examples of "what" I've done if you like but I'll leave them out of this comment.
> "living a fulfilling life" means other trade offs, and potential losses.
Part of how I know I'm doing the thing is that the trade-offs and losses don't concern me. If Y matters to me, and X really is necessary to have a life with Y, then I do X. X is simply the price of having Y, which I'll gladly pay.
In contrast, when I feel resentful of a price I'm paying, it's evidence that I'm not following my sense of rightness.
Agreed. I think coding agents have shown us one very important thing: It was never about the code.
Your idea and how well you can execute on it, i.e. how well you understand the problem space, is what has always mattered.
Coding being so easy now has just pulled back the curtain and shown the world that software developers really don't have much left to contribute. It's been done, a thousandfold.
I feel like everyone already knew the code was the easy part, even pre-AI.
> Coding being so easy now has just pulled back the curtain and shown the world that software developers really don't have much left to contribute. It's been done, a thousandfold.
Maybe, but I feel like there's a reason that the "useful" AI-generated work all seems to come from people who could get to the same result given "infinite" time anyways.
AI tool usage reflects and amplifies your own skill sets IMO, and I think it's pretty hard to be amazing at software architecture design but be bad at coding.
> I feel like everyone already knew the code was the easy part, even pre-AI.
I don’t agree with this at all. There still tons of buggy software around, and we ship multi-gigabyte electron installs that make fanspeeds go high and are way less efficient than software written 20 years ago.
Also the largest problem of AI written code is that is so hard to maintain, so no, coding is not the easy part.
I think it is the other way round. Building requirements from many sources of data and view points is the easy part. Implementing great, maintainable systems out of them needs specialists.
I agree there's a bunch of buggy software, my contention is that a lot of that exists is because people are bad at the hard part and the easy part!
I am also dissatisfied at the current state of software so feel your pain. I think it's just that like .... I think if you can't get the code right you're probably not getting the requirements etc right either.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. It's completely obviously that this is a 100% vibe coded slop project which is already supported with out of the box tools. There was, and is, almost zero need for this.
I don't get it. ChatGPT's Codex app allows you to use your machine, when its locked. It has full computer use, can code, open browsers, apps, etc. Why would we need a separate app for this?
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