Even if you're a solid software engineer and do your best to keep up in an AI world, you have to deal with all the indirect impacts that AI has had on collaboration, code quality, management decisions, product decisions, etc.

I don't have a solution and I'm really struggling to figure out what I want to do next. I've been unable to identify something that could provide me with income that hasn't been equally harmed by AI. I'm open to suggestions.

All that being said, I'd join such a support group

My employer has been encouraging us to use LLMs in our coding work, and I've been resisting, but their encouragement is rapidly converting into requirement. We have to start submitting reports from Claude showing how much we utilized it. I've been desperately wanting to return more of my time to writing, and this LLM push has been the last psychological shove I needed to start moving away from the industry[1].

I'm sure I'll still code for fun, and for my own projects, but I think I'm going to be done with day-job coding unless AI turns out to be a bubble and/or the upcoming unsubsidized price tags throw cold water on the whole enterprise. If I can't make a living with writing, I may have to open a Cajun food truck or something.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847511

Nothing felt better than writing code, and feeling proud of what I had built. Now I am being forced at work to use AI/LLMs because "it's faster" and I feel like my whole life, the career I fought for, has been sucked away.

Idk, might switch to driving trains, if they don't automate that too...

Someone was describing their time in Navy around the 70s or 80s. They’re job was to perform maintenance on some sort of electronic system on ship. They mentioned the training in electronic design repair they were given in the Navy and how good it was, setting them up for an EE degree later in life quite well.

They went on to describe that nowadays no one does that. That job now involves removing modular commercial off the shelf hardware components, sticking them on diagnostic machines and maybe ordering by a replacement or running a calibration. No useful technical skill or knowledge learned.

LLM driven development feels like a rough analog in software. Sure, there’s going to be new jobs created, they’ll just be less valuable and worse across almost every factor.

I could maybe be content with it if they didn’t just claw back remote work. Why the fuck should I still be sitting in an office hours a day when the agents do all the real work.

I was already getting annoyed with the profession and its CV-driven development, and mostly saw code as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but that only means I've not lost a sense of identity: I am absolutely also struggling to figure out what to do next.

2. Create agents to crawl the internet and invite anyone who has posted such sentiments

3. Best not to tell them that they were contacted via ai

More seriously if you set one up, it will likely attract many people.

On the other hand I definitely feel like AI makes developers lazier, and if they're not properly reviewing the code it can have some disastrous consequences. It seems to have calmed down a bit but we went through a phase of swimming in a deluge of AI slop, I guess the temperature has been turned down a bit as I no longer get three emoji-filled documents for every change I introduce. It definitely feels like the last 30 years of my career have been swept away, but the past is gone and we can't get it back, and I have a wealth of experience that is still useful.

I don't know about other companies and industries but certainly the message from our leadership is that AI is here, and it's staying, so it's either a case of get on board or look for another job. I'm currently building AI augmented tools to stay relevant and hopefully survive the next round of job cuts.