But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.
We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles, but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families.
I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up their popular subreddits list years ago, but for a while subreddits like r/childfree were constantly in everyone's default feeds. Redditors would talk about people who had kids as "breeders" as a derogatory term and treat them like they'd made terrible decisions with their lives.
I didn't realize how much this carried over into the real world until my friends and I started having kids. I knew a few people who treated our decisions like we were making terrible mistakes and throwing our lives away. I still encounter people from younger generations who are confused when I say that I like spending time with my kids. They can't imagine how that would be enjoyable in any way. When you grow up with your chosen social media telling you that the smart people are maximizing their bank accounts, minimizing their responsibilities, and doing as little as possible to get there, they can't fathom how someone could be happy with kids.
We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.
This is very well put.
I think the culture today is what pushes us towards that: we have a very individualistic culture, which I think comes from the US. I'm from southern Europe, where family used to be very important, whereas now we've adopted a much more individual-centered view.
We have "freedom" as a value, but it's hard to tell what to do with it. You are privileged, therefore you can do whatever you want. But what is it that I want? What do I do with my freedom, privilege, options? We also need an objective, and "to be happy" is not a good objective, because we humans are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. Seeing stereotyped photos of happy people on tropical beaches on Instagram makes it even harder to remember what happiness is.
For happiness you need objectives, things you believe in, a sense of purpose.
This sounds very judgmental. Don't assume there's a single way to live a happy life. People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.
Does it?? That sounds like the perfect life for me - I don’t need to contribute to others to make myself happy, I’m already happy on my own.
To me, this sounds like there’s something wrong with you - your capacity to just be happy by yourself is broken, you need the happiness of others to validate your life, and that’s a terrible way to live, always desperate to get what you need from others.
Rabindranath Tagore
How amazing and ironic or a reminder it is that the comments below that seem the most reasonable and avoid generalizing an entire group of people or way of life are the ones that are the least likely to drive more comments because they are perfectly reasonable.
From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo
For some it works for some it doesn’t. The hard problem is knowing yourself well enough to make the right choice. Personally, I’m in the “you get what you give” camp but I know not everyone is. Again, the key is knowing which camp you actually belong in. I want to add that “knowing yourself well enough” is no small task and can take a lifetime meanwhile you encounter the forks in the road of life almost daily so.. much easier typed than done.
/turning 50 in about 2 months so, while not that old enough to be considered wise, have been around the block once or twice
Once that’s done there really isn’t a purpose in life other than to pass it along to someone else. Dare I say that’s your responsibility. What are you gonna do, buy another toy? Go to another bar?
I have the utmost respect for people with kids, but I also think that an individual needs to be 100% ready to have one, and not just reproduce because it would somehow provide them with a purpose.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles!
Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.
No one is attached to some mythical objective reality. Everyone is imprisoned by the same social, economic and thought prisons.
For real though, I’m not wasting tokens on comments. I do wonder if we will pick up habits when interacting with them a lot though.
There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.
I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision.
(I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)
I guess I get why that irks a lot of the child-free people but it wasn't really the point I was making.
I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.
This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
To be clear though feeling good is not the justification per se, it's pretty much just the signal that you're aligned correctly. When you aim outward, morality becomes less about self image and more about stewardship which is why it tends to work.
I’m also not claiming morality is relative or "attained" particularly beyond normal development as an adult. I would assert that we already know what’s right, the problem isn’t discovering the moral law, it’s obsessing over our own righteousness instead of living it.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.
I recall being pretty miserable working in a maze of cubicles surrounded by coworkers. I don't think there are single solutions for any of these questions. What works well for one person will not work well for another.
Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.
You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.
Or become a carpenter. The world is going to be flooded by them.
it’s just another tool. lots of people didn’t want to use compilers and got left behind. the world moved on.
i’m older than you and doing fine. it’s just another tech upheaval, we’ve been through plenty.
yes it gets tiring and at some point you find your way off the treadmill. but it’s really not that hard to stay on, especially if you have the experience.
Or just code as you want as a hobby, unrestrained, for whatever you need or makes you happy.
This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
a) Carpentry already happens in the real world
b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture).
Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focused on the wrist mechanics of rubbing sandpaper up and down, you'd be disappointed.
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
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RT 90
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".
That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.
> purchasing power is going down
That is not a new thing.
> quality of goods is going down
Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...
> life expectancy is decreasing
On the whole, this is not the case.
> child mortality is increasing
Globally?
> illiteracy is increasing
Globally?
You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.
People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.
Most people are reactive.
If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.
And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.
They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.
It's also why every empire in history collapsed.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.
Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.
Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
I think most schools provide transportation to away games. But in my city official school sports clubs don't start until high school - before that it's all private club teams.
In my kids' club, the team will provide transportation to far away games in other prefectures, or sometimes for games on school holidays when parents may be working. But it's very common for parents to have to drive their kids an hour or more to other cities within our prefecture. Carpooling is very common.
But most parents want to watch their kids' games as much as possible. Even when the team provides transportation to a game, there are a handful of parents who will make the drive separately to support the team. My son asked me to drive 3 hours to watch an upcoming big game and support the team, and of course I'm not going to say no. To be able to see how far he has progressed, and to know that he wants me there to support him, is special. But also still exhausting at times.
Btw. this is in Central Europe, my kid can go to training by himself with tram/bus. As for the matches, I accompany him if it is in our city, but if it's outside the city then he can either join coach(es), they usually ride kids or not participate in match. We don't have car so can't drive him there. Though soon kid will have to move to higher age league, so not sure what club we will find eventually, the one they are cooperating with is outside the city with like 1+ hour commute one way by public transport, so will certainly look into something closer.
TLDR if my kids were already adult I would have also lot of spare time and teaching/helping kids it's sure more fullfiling than doomscrolling at home. Though I am lazy person, but I was in recent years thinking about helping people instead of doing my work for money, the issue is I don't like most of the people, who need help.
I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example.
What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs.
It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.
One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.
I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.
Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!
Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.
I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon.
We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure…
Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority
The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.”
So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself.
⸻
“Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.”
Historically, this always happens.
Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort.
Each time, people initially interpret it as:
the skill is dying
But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance.
Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility
⸻
“But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.”
This rejects the common fear narrative.
The activities persist, what changes is why they matter.
You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement.
The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist.
⸻
“AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.”
This is the core claim.
Old model:
effort → output → value
New model:
judgment → outcome → value
Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity.
Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact
Not:
Did you make something?
But:
Did reality change because you were involved?
You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention.
⸻
“The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.”
So the post ends optimistic.
AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting.
Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world.
Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly.
Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect).
⸻
In one sentence
The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.
Best summation of my current feelings yet.
this struck me
In most of the world it's more club-based rather than school-based, and that's quite different.
In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.
What is a Hoosier?
If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement.
Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.
Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.
This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.
> But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe.
What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?
I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.
I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.
Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.
Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.
I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.
Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.