Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me

As far as everything else you've said... oof, you need a break. You seem focused on money and ego. Maybe it is time to simplify a bit, explore what else the world has to offer. Worry less about whether anyone else can do your job and more about whether or not you are enjoying your life. Make changes, have some fun. If you don't want a mortgage but have multiples of the deposit needed, buy a smaller, simpler place with cash. Then you don't have rent or a mortgage.

Over the course of a few years, dentists began using 3D scanners to digitally scan patient impressions, which allowed them to email the scans to my dad's dental lab (previously he'd have to drive to each dentist and pick it up in person).

Then, 1-2 years later, they started emailing the 3D scan to a company in China who would do the same work as my dad, and then mail back the finished product directly to the dentist from China. And of course the Chinese dental labs did this at half the price my dad was charging.

He went out of business and ended up retiring early at 55. The "retiring early" explanation was a great one, but the real reason he retired was innovation hit his industry and made it easy for dentists to outsource crown/bridge manufacturing to China. He works for a property maintenance company now for $20/hr, mostly as a way to fill his time (he's doing fine financially).

Most of the comments here are telling you that you'll be ok, and I hope you will be. But the reality is innovation causes disruption in many fields/industries. If you're in the path of disruption, you have to be willing to quickly adapt and learn to live alongside it rather than fight it.

Also remember you're not alone. Technology has been displacing jobs for decades. Life is about learning and adapting. As long as you commit to adapting quickly, learning new skills as necessary and being open to different types of jobs, you should be fine.

To be honest the far greater threat to your job is an increase in the ammount of programmers plus an increase in individual productivity, with an industry declining in growth. There is your threat.

I think you might want to give yourself a break or change of scenery because your post sounds like the burnout is doing all the talking for you and AI is just a convenient external factor to blame. Maybe find a coach or therapist to help lower the intensity and explore what you’d want in life beyond being a top earner.

You can only run at 100% capacity for so long before the exhaustion takes over and your thinking loses clarity. I’ve been there, more than once. Something has to make way for your recovery, ideally giving you space to enjoy what life brings you.

I write code for scientific applications. I used to hire/contract out some work to other devs. In the last 6 months I haven't needed to hire anybody else, doing so would have been a waste of money. This is 100% because of chatgpt.

Many devs are hired by other devs and these people are aware enough to know they don't need you anymore.

Other developers have been spoiled by being the one-eyed person in a room full of blind people. Those developers maybe haven't quite realize what has happened, after all, the blind people still can't code.

The conversation around junior developers is particularly upsetting.

The vast majority of programming is about facilitating, automating and improving business processes. The program artifact only has value as a tool to enable some business processes.

A website facilitates customer communication.

A complete webshop/eCommerce site facilitates selling products; discovery, ordering, invoice generation, logistics, reporting, returns, feedback etc.

The problem is charging for (mostly) time spent implementing the system, rather than the value added by understanding the desired business processes and drawing up an architecture for the system.

It is similar to outsourcing development - if you can solve the hard problem of gathering requirements and designing the data model and system architecture - you might be able to successfully outsource the less valuable parts - and still end up with a decent solution.

Now, with LLMs, a single system architect/senior developer might be able to do the work of a five person consultancy alone. You might not be able to charge five times as much - but perhaps three times for the same or fewer hours worked?

Ed: The money that pays for the software system still comes out of the value added for the customer buying the system. It doesn't really matter how long it takes to build - you need some senior resources to do the "hard part" - and the value added for the customer is the same - they get to stay in/improve their business.

- when the code the model spat out was wrong, how did you fix it? Did you identify it was wrong before you ran it?

- what level of complexity was there in the code, in terms of "business logic" or complexity of the requirements you fed into it?

I ask these two questions because I am not sure an AI will get to the level of experience you have in the near future in _generating_ complex applications, let alone being able to reflect on why its own creations are wrong, fixing them, deploying some output, and then explaining the changes?

A human is going to be in the loop in these cases for a long time, and I'm assuming part or all of your decades of experience has been spent understanding quite how poor people are at explaining their requirements. What if you thought of generative AI as a tool you can learn to utilise to do your job more effectively?

1. AI is a tool, not a replacement: AI is designed to assist, not replace, human tasks and decisions.

2. AI needs human supervision: AI technologies require expert human supervision for their creation, maintenance, and evolution.

3. AI creates jobs: AI often creates more jobs than it eliminates by automating routine tasks.

4. Continual learning: By continuously learning and adapting, you can ensure your skills remain relevant in the AI era.

5. Human creativity is irreplaceable: AI can't replicate human creativity, which is vital for problem-solving and innovation in programming.

6. AI ethics: Ethical considerations in AI deployment require human judgement, which AI lacks.

7. Emotional Intelligence: AI can't replace the emotional intelligence humans bring to their work, including empathy, understanding, and interpersonal communication.

Hope this helps.

Programmers are really artists that way. Our job is not to program computers. Our job is to figure out the client's needs. The implementation on the computer is a matter of craft. That is, it's a skill we've practiced and honed, but it's not the essence of our job. It's not the artistry, any more than holding a paintbrush is the artistry.

It's why I've long discouraged programmers from thinking of themselves as computer jockeys. A lot of developers pat themselves on the back for skills that aren't really that important -- jobs that computers can do better than we can. That was true even before AI, such as the interminable worry about "optimizations" that are better solved by compilers, libraries, and hardware.

I don't doubt that some artists will be replaced by Canva, with worse but acceptable results, and that some developers will be replaced by AI. But there's still a lot of room for us human beings to do what we're actually good at -- being human ourselves and knowing what other humans need. The more you think of yourself as somebody who writes code and are not a "people person", the more you should rightly worry for your job.

Your total comp might go down or it might go up. Every time you make a career move that’s the risk you take. But if you’re healthy and smart and diligent enough to be highly paid today you are in a better position than 95% of your countrymen and 99.9% of the rest of the world, no matter what happens.

Enjoy the time you have on this planet. Don’t let fear of the unknown get in the way of that.

There is a ChatGPT craze right now but it will cool down eventually. It's not the first time this is happening. Google changed the way we search the internet, suddenly everything can be at your fingertips. Teachers didn't lose their jobs and people still go to school since you can't google things when you don't know the fundamentals of the topic. Chatbots changed the way we approach customer support. Support people didn't lose their jobs (at least entirely), since chatbots are subpar experience. If you are 20 years in, you can probably remember Visual Basic 6 - a tool which everybody can learn and write programs easily. We, software engineers, didn't lose our jobs.

I'm not a doctor, but I've suffered with mental health issues in the past. You strike me as someone in the midst of clinical depression and anxiety, and (relating to the idea that nothing is real in particular) like you might have early signs of psychosis.

Please get help. It is not the big deal you think it is: SSRIs, therapy, and lifestyle changes (relax a bit!) will help you see this. Things will be OK, but you're clearly struggling right now. Making a post here was a good idea, but now it is time to take stock and consult a professional or two.

Good luck, and look after yourself.

I imagine it's like this for many people. And, personally, I'm trying not to think/dwell on it, and simply move on with life and projects and work. Whatever happens, I know for a fact I don't have control over it.

The seed of disruption has now been planted, so we have to wait and see in which direction it grows. But I think a big wave will eventually come that will displace a lot of jobs in one big swoop.

Self-help Singh has the right attitude for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHxwY3Fz2gU

We are still early adopters in using AI to increase productivity. The society as a whole is not yet aware of what is coming and the results are essentially unpredictable. Your attachment to the top 5% salary band might be irrelevant in 10 or 20 years because we might live in some kind of eco-utopia by then. Or all wealth might move to AI-controlling entities, in which your current standing is irrelevant and beyond your control.

Stop worrying. Focus on figuring out ways to increase your output with the help of the new tool or invest in AI to ride the wave you expect to drown in. You're way ahead of the 7.5b other people.

Anyone could look up an internet reference and copy some lines of code without being special. Or could download a python library that does what was needed and write almost no code.

GPT is a kind of improvement of search which again makes the common knowledge base more usable. It obviously lets people do less work just as installing a module saves a mountain of work.

Yet jobs have not seemed to get more scarce since search engines appeared. We have built out a huge internet infrastructure and that might have skewed things because it needed such a lot of effort and people.

We've simply (IMO) done more and more amazing things because there has been an appetite for them. Perhaps there is a limit to software and there might be a time when there are enough people doing it that the salaries look less amazing but it need not fall off a cliff suddenly.

We tend to do the same things many times over anyhow,

Really? What projects? I think its telling that you haven't replied to any of the comments here - is this post just BS?

A take that really summed up how I feel about all this hysteria around LLMs and ChatGPT specifically: People are praying to it, treating it like an Oracle. Anything you can dream up, GPT can do. Its exhausting.

Meanwhile, copilot x routinely spits out code with bugs, fumbles refactoring, misinterprets which variables are needed, and in general is a helpful but annoying autocomplete or template tool. Will it replace workers? Probably, but they weren’t really doing much to begin with then. You still need people who understand the business and domain, the systems in place, how they interact and connect, etc. I don’t believe a LLM is capable of that.

Also, people mentioning GPT10 or whatever might as well say it will be doing magic. There is no way to know how it will develop. How the models will be gatekept. How government policy will change or stifle it. And let’s not forget that progress isn’t exponential or linear forever, it’s generally logarithmic.

> I have been already working nearly at a burn-out level for many years ... Rent is sky high ... I don't feel comfortable taking on mortgage ... I am unable to enjoy any content, movie, tv show anymore ...

you are struggling with yourself here, not GPT4.

You're clearly stressed, you say 'near burn out' but being unable to enjoy things that you used to like is straight up depression, you know?

Have you considered seeing a counselor?

I recently listened to a conversation between Lex Fridman and Stephen Wolfram [1]. Stephen said something that stuck with me for a while. Something along the lines:

GPTs are statistical word guessing machines. They regurgitate the average of the internet. You can get around that by placing with temperature and top-k, but that'll only make them less accurate, and increase the chances for them to hallucinate.

You, however, are an expert. Better than the average of the internet. Years of experience, and likely with higher standards. You understand the requirements, architect maintainable systems, and align with the company goals. You learned how to read requirements from context and between the lines.

Yes, GPTs can do highly complex things, and sometimes it feels magical or even scary. But you'll have to prime them to do so, and you'll have to guide them. They are your junior programmer, and you are their lead. You understand context, and they don't (simply because they don't have any).

Start to accept that from now on you have your personal junior dev. Learn to guide him into the right direction, and learn to provide accurate tasks. I'd also suggest looking into GitHub copilot chat to see where this is going.

If we're lucky, they'll get better with time and lots of research, but that's (likely) none of your concerns.

Uneducated opinion:

From this point on, I think it's likely the corpus they consume gets worse because they are starting to consume their own generated, average-of-the-internet content. You built your own Reddit bot, and know how easy it is to get generated content out there. It's a problem that isn't solved yet, and with time, it's becoming even more difficult because the number of different public models (which suffer from the same challenges) is steadily increasing, and therefore detection of such content gets a lot harder. The technology might get exponentially better, but in the end it boils down to the corpus they consume and learn from. This will slow things down, and will give you some time to learn to use these tools to your advantage, not see them as competition.

[1] https://lexfridman.com/stephen-wolfram-4/

If you've reached the top 5% in your field, I'm sure you will be able to do this.

If AI is giving you anxiety, maybe take a break from reading and thinking about it for a while.

It sounds like you may also need to find meaning outside of work. You mentioned you are burned out and it sounds like a large part of your identity and self worth are tied to you work. This has helped you be successful, but it can be unhealthy for you as a person, a human being who is more than a job title.

This is great. It means you have more financial security than most in the event of a worst case scenario and the financial aspect appears to be underpinning a lot of your concerns so give yourself some credit for that.

The most valuable antidote to the concept of AI replacing skilled workers is depth of experience. Before your job becomes obsolete, the jobs of every engineer with half your experience need to become obsolete and we're a very long way away from that happening.

A professional translator I’ve known for more than twenty-five years has, within the last few months, seen all of his sources of work dry up. He worked in a field that required specialized knowledge and experience and for which there was steady demand, but there was little human interaction: clients would e-mail him texts, and he would e-mail back the translations. He is angry and upset because he believes—probably correctly—that he can produce more accurate translations than GPT-4. But the price difference is so great between machine and human translation, and the average quality difference now is so small, that his clients have dropped all of their human translators. They have offered him some work checking machine translations, he says, but the pay is much lower. He is now, in his sixties, trying to start a new career.

I myself was a professional translator for twenty years, until 2005, when I took a university job. Most of the translation work I did—for which I earned a good income—can now be done much faster and more cheaply by LLMs. In the mid-1990s, I started also working as a lexicographer—writing and editing entries for bilingual dictionaries. That was difficult work, but I enjoyed it and felt proud to be able to do it. Before I retired from my academic position earlier this year, I had been thinking of returning to dictionary work part-time in my retirement. There’s no future in that now, though, because LLMs have pretty much eliminated the need for human-edited language dictionaries.

Both my daughter and the daughter of a friend of mine are freelance illustrators. While both of them are continuing to get work now, they are following developments in Midjourney etc. with growing worry.

In contrast, a couple of weeks ago I got together with an old friend about my age whom I hadn’t seen in a while. He worked for many years as a glazier, and since he retired on a good union pension he has kept busy repairing regulators for scuba-diving equipment. I tried telling him how excited and worried I was about AI, but he was dismissive. It took me a while to understand why: The work he has done—installing windows and mirrors, fixing precision devices on which people’s lives depend—is not likely to be done by machines any time soon. It’s those of us who have done most of our work in front of computers who need to worry.

It's super useful for finding out how things work like asking it how to use an SDK to do something it works really well for it even provides stuff I searched the docs repeatedly for.

But for complex logic that I want to be too lazy to do, it literally just wastes my time. I tried for an hour to get it to do something and tried to modify the code to get it to work. Ended up just doing my own version completely.

As per my anecdata above, if you are working in field where the value that you add is pretty low. You can get replaced by ChatGPT quite easily. In some ways cookie-cutter web development is like that. If your job can be outsourced to cheap and less experienced (in terms of domain knowledge) people, it can be 'outsourced' to ChatGPT. Do hard stuff. Not hard as in you are able to buidl a web page with this weeks' new framework, but hard as in solving a problem that other people cannot. If other people can't solve the problem, it doesn't matter if you're competing with an AIbot or a meatbot.

I was forced almost immediately to go onto YT and find a swift crash course. I'm sure I could've continued prompting it to explain things and I probably could've extrapolated how to implement the code, but with my experience, a 30-60 min condensed video seems more helpful to me, idk.

I guess my point is that there will still be need for those with technical knowledge. AI isnt at a point where it can generate fully functional apps, and I don't really believe this is coming anytime soon. GPTs are relatively new in the AI space and there's already plenty of concern around their future viability.

I think a lot of the fear is just bad faith marketing from openAI, and all the wrapper startups that have sprung up like weeds recently, and they all love to claim to their wrapper is coming for SWE jobs. If i see one more "RIP software engineers," I might literally laugh myself out of my chair.

I saw one hilarious demo on twitter from GPT-engineer. it claimed to be able to generate entire projects, and it did create a handful of project files with ~20 lines of boilerplate code. It's pretty comical that we're all afraid of this tool, myself included.

And to everyone saying "well what about GPT-8," GPTs' fundamental flaw are hallucinations, meaning GPT-8 will still suffer from most, if not all, of the same issues as GPT-4. I don't really believe any version of a GPT will threaten SWE jobs en masse. I've also been seeing some interesting articles warning how training AIs with AI generated output will effectively kill the models within a couple generations, so let's see if "AI is the worst it will ever be today" is actually going to be true.

Regardless, I dont think you have much to worry about, it sounds like you're senior/principle level already and AI has the least threat to anyone in those higher levels. Rest easy, you'll be alright.

At some point, AI indeed will "replace" what people like you (and me, who has pretty much the same background as you) do. We are just tools that knows how to code.

Quite a big part of my time, as part of a large development team, consists of fixing bugs. I believe AI in the near future will be able to solve those, based on input and expectations. Someone still needs to verify the code, and take responsibility for the changes, before they're released to production. This is where I think developers will be needed. I don't think you'll ever find a PO so frisky as to just release it, unless for maybe very small domains.

But.. we'll all get hit. And the way I see it, developers are not in the direct line of fire.

I hope UBI will never actually happen, even though they're testing it out several places in the world recently. I also hope a One World Government will never happen, even though it looks like we're heading for it. I also hope WHO, UN and NATO will not gain the power they seem to strive for, but I don't see much resistance.

Instead.. what I do personally, which might be a solution for you also, is to try to embrace it. These years are quite unique in the history of the human kind. It's a mixture of 1984, Terminator 2, Ex Machina and more. I have a bad feeling about it all, but at the same time I'm curious, and still have hope. But also, I'll try to resist the sinister parts of it whenever I get the chance.

1) You currently have top %5 salary, not tomorrow, but today - you probably doesn't have to worry that much for the next 5 years at least and probably will enjoy similar high salary

2) You have currently 20 years of experience - that's a lot. Compare to someone who is currently studying IT or just starting their education.

3) After 20 years of working in industry most likely you have some savings and warchest

4) You probably in better situation comparing to someone just starting carieer - most people work around 40 years in their field before retiring, you already half there.

5) Worst case maybe you won't enjoy top 5% salary but median Tech salary - which is still way above median salary in most countries. You managed to live with lower salary before so will do fine as well.

6) With your experience probably easier for you to find remote job if haven't done already. You seems like don't have mortage so probably easy to move to cheaper city or even country even if just for couple of years.

7) Many expats on retired visa in south east asia (thailand, malaysia, indonesia, vietnam) - life is so much cheaper there - that's assuming you are currently from more developed countries.

8) If you salaries will get lower you will have 3 choices:

a) live with lower salary like you used to before but at least you job will be easier to because more automated by LLM so probably less stressful

b) should be easier for you to learn and pick any new specializations with LLM as your copilot: rust, machine learning, vr/ar, robotics,

c) embrace it and use it to develop some you own product/SaaS/app as a side hassle/hobby - it's probably now the best window of opportunity for indie devs.

But at the same time, I think you are underestimating how slow society changes. MP3s of popular music were available on the Internet in 1996. But cd sales didn't fall below the 1996 level until 2005.

> It just feels like anyone could do it.

This.

Yes, you’re 100% right. No, AI will not take away all the jobs, that’s not going to happen, but no one thinks it’s going to happen, anyone calling that out and saying… “don’t worry! AI is just a tool…” are beating a strawman.

The reality is that doing difficult highly paid work will become significantly eaiser and a much wider pool of people will be able to apply to do jobs that previously only people demanding significantly higher wages were able to actually do.

…and that will mean, a surplus of people wanting jobs, to the delight of large businesses who will use it as an (entirely reasonable) excuse to choose to employ cheaper workers.

Flat fact: 20 year of experience and a college degree mean nothing if someone can do the same job for 60% of the pay, and there are 1) people who will accept that and 2) the technology will increasingly enable this scenario.

Certainly, other roles will appear in other areas, but face the blunt reality: the days of scarcity based high wage roles for programmers such as there are today is numbered.

If you want to maintain your income and level, you probably need to start looking around for ways of doing that now, before there are 60 people applying to do your job on Fiverr.

If you stand still, you are correct, you’re basically screwed.

…but, you don’t have to stand still.

Remember, you are better than the majority of the people who will be able to do your current job in the future using AI. That’s why you have your job now.

Lean into it with your professional development to make yourself better than you are now using the tools.

That seems like the only really sensible advice I’ve seen recently.

Imagine experiencing the leap from assembly to Python, almost overnight. That would feel terrifying as an assembly engineer, but people would realize at least for certain types of projects, they are now significantly more productive using Python. Moreover, that new speed quickly becomes the expectation. Assembly programmers have their niche, but there's significant demand for python people. Demand grew to meet supply.

I think artists are experiencing a similar crisis. Me, with no art skills can make beautiful pictures. However, my friends who were already artists are making breathtaking things by embracing these tools. My view is that these tools are ultimately going to move artists from assembly to Python.

Rent? Fuck that. Your life is on the line and this is for all the marbles. You find a way to go rent free. Maybe do like the bums are doing all over the place, live in a van, etc. Nobody seems to care. Save that money and then get out.

I did this, ending my career in IT back in 2006. Best move ever. When they fired everyone on the last contract I was on, I can't tell how good it felt.

By the way, the house I lived in at the end... Remember the house in Fight Club? That would have been an improvement.

A very large, difficult to comprehend, shakeup is happening at all the tech companies in the world. Stuff is falling apart in a big way and it will be interesting to see how it comes together again. Just think about stackoverflow and then think carefully about every other service you use online.

I think some of you are in denial about where your salary comes from. When these companies can't compete they aren't going to continue paying you, and they will probably fire you long before then.

If the worst happens you will adapt, it will suck in some ways, but life will still be worth living. Maybe you will enjoy not working at burn out levels all the time.

The worst may not happen. You may find yourself in high demand as someone who can really use AI productively. Who can say?

Certainly it would be prudent to keep a close eye on things and make sure you are one of the people that can keep adding significant value with AI.

In the meantime, I implore you not to ruin what is good now because of fears for a future that may not materialize, or will do so in ways you don't anticipate.

Here is a tip: take no platitudes, and change your life in a way that works around your worst fears. The healthcare bit you can solve by emigrating to a country with free healthcare, for example. If you have money for a deposit in the place where "rent is sky high," maybe you should consider a different place to live, maybe even a rural location.

Nobody really knows how things are going to develop. But if our brains have gotten us this far, maybe our brains will get us out of a potential future crisis caused by AIs. Just hedge your risks.

If you have the willpower to do that I wouldn't worry that much. Maybe use the extra productivity ChatGPT gives you to learn some skills that LLM-AIs will take a long, long time to learn if ever: specialization. Industrial programming, scientific programming, etc. One of the reasons I'm not worried about AI is that I work with machines so specialized there's maybe half a dozen people on the planet with my skillset and almost none of it exists on the internet at all.

Yesterday I tried to get GPT4 to generate me a Dovecot Sieve filter to move .ru email to Junk and mark it seen, it failed 3 times and hallucinated some syntax that looked plausible, but actually is not supported by Dovecot. My hope was that I would not have to spend 15 minutes Googling and could get an answer faster from GP4, but in this case GPT4 did not succeed.

LLMs don't understand meanings at all. They are anti-compressors. If the information content of a message is how unpredictable it is (and therefore how uncompressable), LLMs generate the most predictable, least information-dense output from your prompt.

So: focus on meaning and decision making. Set LLMs to do fluff and shiny bits.

Otherwise, if you buy a house, and later you decide you don't want to (or cannot) pay for mortgage, you can just sell your house and buy a smaller one (or move back to renting).

Sure, the risk isn't zero, but if you keep renting and the housing bubble keeps going on you may also burn a lot of money in the end. Nothing is risk free, and you're in a better situation than most.

Even if you take AI aside, it remains a fact that nothing will ever stay as it is, things will always move, the world around you will always change (we get older, everything gets re-evaluated constantly as we age). I thought we'd reached the ultimate end-goal with Turbo Pascal, then, Borland Delphi — why use anything else, ever? This is not a particular fault of the AI era, it's just one that hits you and your profession a bit closer. The exact same thing happened to SO MANY OTHER PROFESSIONS over the years.

There was an article a long while back about a US law firm that decided to try and outsource a huge case by shipping tons of boxes to a specifically-trained "warehouse" of workers in the Philippines, knowing that their law (and capability to speak/read/understand English) is similar enough to that of the US. And, from what I recall, it turned out that while this was a fantastic business decision which saved them a lot of money by managing to outsource the most expensive part of the those huge cases, it also became clear that "being a lawyer" may have lost its long-held prosperous perspective (at the bottom).

I say this because that article was written over a decade ago (if I remember correctly), and even today, law-schools are still packed, lawyers are still making a lot of money, everything is still... sorta fine (for them).

You will NOT live forever. So the question is only if you can sustain your career long enough to make it through and then enjoy your ACTUAL LIFE once you're reasonable safe, financially. I am very, very confident that you will be able to do that, even with the rise of AI.

I look at all the mid-to-large-scale projects I've been involved with, as a developer, and 80% of the real work is figuring out how to approach certain things, and how everything should tie together. Writing the code itself was never the problem. Never. For AI to take over completely (aside from writing certain functions or boilerplate starters), I'd argue we've still got a very long way to go.

a human is still very necessary in the loop. there is no loop without the human. currently, there should be no loop without one. cost prohibitive if nothing else.

the better the instructions, the better the output. something must be done with the output, and it has to be done safely and consistently.

there will be new challenges. there will be new careers. (lol no prompt engineering is not it.) there will be new and old jobs.

content not so compelling? take a walk. touch a hand tool, or a crochet needle. escape the screen. blame the content before yourself. was it ever that good? or just good enough? have you already read the good stuff? maybe nothing good as of late. maybe chatgpt is simply causing you to question what makes content… good.

spend a little less. save a little more. your compensation is likely “a little high,” and may suffer a little bit. keep solving problems and it isn’t yet an existential crisis.

where are we going? too many variables, someone will successfully guess, plenty will unsuccessfully. somewhere new yet familiar.

if any of this wasn’t useful, didn’t resonate, or didn’t even make sense, throw it out. just like one should do with language model output.

Also, higher quality media would probably do some good too! Shows that are well-written, funny, and emotionally interesting weren't written by AI. Plenty of schlock was written before the advent of AI, so it's not exactly fair to blame AI for unenjoyable content. Check out Abbott Elementary, What We Do In the Shadows, The Lives of Others, or The Seventh Seal

If it were that easy for AI to step in and replace developers, then we'd have seen the same thing with "codeless" frameworks.

Maybe one day in the distant future it will be a different story. But I'd wager you'd be dead before that happens.

We still need experienced engineers to see these mistakes and fix them.

If anything, using ChatGPT will help with productivity and reduce the workload that is pushing us at burnout levels.

On the job security front, even if the LLMs get better at coding, they still need technical people that can articulate what is needed.

You will be fine, just take a deep breath and enjoy the present.

If you didn’t fear “kids with stackoverflow” taking away your job, then you really shouldn’t do it anymore with chatgpt. It writing anything remotely complex is just.. we don’t even know how far away that is.

You need to be more concerned about boring, usual tech industry ageism doing you in than an AI taking your job.

It is much easier for another dev to understand your complex system now, which makes you replaceable.

Stop reading tech for a few weeks and you will get another perspective and you won't feel so neurotic.

It's great as an assistant, but still very much needs a human.

Your services will be even more valuable in assisting others who are completely dependent on whatever form of AI is doing the programming.

/s not /s

Just covering my bases. I really can't tell anymore.

1. AI-assistence helps senior people even more that junior people right now. For example I can prompt ChatGPT far better what I want it to generate including some key points to consider that that juniors don't even know about. I can also start typing a solution with autocomplete in mind, knowing roughly how something like it will look like, to get optimal autocompletes over mutli lines, and can see right away if there are subtile problems that differ from my expectation. In total one senior + AI can compensate multiple missing juniors, but a junior cannot become that senior this way - GPT can be a good coach to get there over time, though.

2. This means roughly that companies will trim "fat" from the organization, but the remaining highly skilled people might earn even more (or at least not get fired) since they become more and more responsibility that was previously held by those fired people. It also means that bootstrapping something from scratch is now even more feasible if you're junior - these new AI-assited tools are quite good, and can augment individual weaknesses (like devs starting a company can use a marketing ai tool to build something good enough instead of typical abysmal UX/techblahblah raving about their product.

3. Both directions in point 2 basically leads to every dev over time becoming a manager: but not with humans as direct reports, but controlling powerful tools upto autonomous agents that execute unsupervised on nontrivial stuff. As software creation itself becomes a commodity, STOP VIEWING IT AS A CRAFT. its an industrialization moment, where especially the localized creativity/problemsolving part is automated away. Don't be proud of the code itself or similar, but about your ability to deliver products/projects in a fast and reliable way - so you can tackle more complicated problems within these products instead of always fiddling with the lowlevel details.

4. There is a paradox at play that is important to know: yes, we're at a race to the bottom when it comes to coding, so getting a software that does what someone needs goes towards (but not reaching) zero. Naively, this means that developers' time is also worth less and they will be earn less and less until being obsolete. But the cheaper something becomes, demand increases, since suddenly a lot of stuff is now in the financial range that it is worth tackling with code. I think its called "Jevons Paradox".

5. For you specifically, its simply moving up the abstraction ladder again, with prompting as a higher level programming language (but being able to drop down into lower messes if really needed, as always) + hard focus on the "shipping" part including better/cheaper fully managed hosting for stuff. Over a year, expect to do more different projects/products over the same time period and/or more sophisticated topics than before since you are freed from the lowlevel code monkey work rather soonish.

6. We're at the _start_ of the curve and times are wild, and my previous points already include a healthy future prediction (which is more like months instead of yers nowadays). Still it takes _many_ years until heavy changes in the economy really propagate through, since there are layers of people sitting on brakes. Computers and the Internet took (and still are taking!) maaaaany years to shift businesses, especially conservative areas (which there are A LOT).

Side note: while arguably there always might be some people left doing the really basics everyone else builds ontop of, who have to know their shit and go deep down the rabbit holes, there are concinving predictions that AI researchers will be jobless quickly, before many others, so I don't believe in that anymore. Better ignore this path when starting today, and strictly focus on raw shipping skills, which probably means managing/orchestrating some flavors of product-building-bots instead.

Bonus points: I'd buy the house, now, on fixed terms. Inflation is a thing that helps you here when you have a mortgage. Also when you are unable to pay the monthly rates for your house, what is different from not being able to pay your rent? Its not that much worse in practice. The only thing I strongly suggest is moving close to a big/growing city instead of buying property in a maybe beautiful village somewhere unknown, the curve is swinging back already with people moving back to cities.

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I understand that you're feeling a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the future of your career in the face of advancing AI technology. It's normal to have concerns about job security and how automation may impact the field you've dedicated years of expertise to.

While it's true that AI and automation are transforming various industries, including web development, it's important to remember that technology also creates new opportunities and demands for skilled professionals. The key lies in adapting and continuously learning to stay relevant in the evolving job market.

Here are a few suggestions to help address your concerns:

Stay updated and embrace new technologies: Continuously learn and explore emerging technologies in your field. AI itself can be a powerful tool that enhances productivity and efficiency. By staying informed and incorporating new technologies into your skill set, you can remain valuable and adaptable.

Diversify your skills: Consider expanding your skill set beyond web development. Look for adjacent areas or emerging fields where your expertise can be applied, such as data science, machine learning, or cybersecurity. This diversification can make you more versatile and open up new opportunities.

Focus on problem-solving and creativity: While AI can automate certain tasks, it cannot replace human creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities. Emphasize these skills in your work and seek out projects that require innovative solutions.

Network and collaborate: Build a strong professional network within your industry. Engage with peers, attend conferences or meetups, and participate in online communities. Collaborating with others can lead to new opportunities and provide a support system during uncertain times.

Keep a growth mindset: Cultivate a mindset of continuous learning and adaptability. Embrace change and view it as an opportunity to grow and evolve professionally. Develop a willingness to explore new areas and acquire new skills as needed.

Regarding your concerns about UBI (Universal Basic Income) and healthcare, it's essential to stay informed about policy discussions and advocate for fair and equitable support systems for workers in the changing economy. It's a complex societal issue that requires ongoing dialogue and engagement.

Remember, you are not alone in your concerns. Many professionals are grappling with similar uncertainties. By proactively seeking ways to adapt and remaining open to change, you can navigate the evolving landscape and find new opportunities that align with your skills and interests.