Another vent about AI
TL:DR; AI is a double edged Katana and I am toddler trying to learn how to use it. For the better or worse need to learn how to yield it (and for the good) without destroying myself in the process.
I am going through an existential crisis, combined with multiple crises at once. Back in 2023/2024, a friend said I should give ChatGPT a try (he is not a SWE but does sys admin). He was telling me how it generates code. I'd seen the odd post about it too. I was very sceptical. It was primitive but it generated code which I didn’t think was possible. Even then At that point I assumed we were a very long time away from it being able to take jobs.
2+ years later, I am completely wrong. I tried to stay away. I tried telling myself it's not good enough. But each iteration of the foundational model, I am left dumbfounded by how advanced it gets. I should add... I work in Data Science and have an MSc in Data Science. Even then, I didn't quite anticipate how rapid the progression would be.
Even as recently as 2-3 months ago, I was sceptical. Mind you, I hadn't fully tried Claude at the time. I kept turning a blind eye to it. I had been using AI quite extensively, primarily for documentation. In the meantime, I'd seen people produce AI slop that made me want to pull my hair out. Then my company upgraded the models we could access. The moment of realisation came when it provided a plan to a solution I'd been stuck on. It gave four solutions. 3 out of 4 were things I'd already considered architecturally. The fourth I hadn't really given much thought. That was the moment I entered a new crisis point.
I realised that the seeing AI advances from 2024 to 2026 are (anecdotally speaking) means that I may be witnessing death of Moore's Law.
As a millennial who's been through dial-up, the WWW, and years of programming, I have begrudgingly given way to native JS -> jQuery/YUI -> Angular -> React, CSS -> SCSS, static JS -> NPM, and from static deployments to IaaS, automation, CI/CD. There was a time I actually built whole native frameworks and libraries to address specific requirements for a company.
Then, 2-3 weeks later, new foundational model versions dropped. I also need to add that my mental health took an even deeper dive. Being AuDHD doesn't help either. I've been getting such a dopamine rush because I can now quite confidently multitask. Let one agent debug a piece of code, while another plans documentation, another plans test cases, another does initial code reviews, and another does research into a topic. So these foundational models are probably one of the worst things to happen to me. I have been losing sleep over it. I am still grappling with it.
I'm also having this realisation that it'll probably get a lot worse before it gets better.
I am self-reflecting…
The point of all this is that the world is changing, the way electricity changed it, or the steam engine, or the printing press before all of that.
I guess, as software engineers, we have to make a choice about what kind of engineer we want to be. Ultimately, you are responsible for what it does. Think of it this way, you can choose to use an NPM package or write something yourself. You can delegate that responsibility to some obscure package. But if it ends up having a critical vulnerability, that is your responsibility. I'm not saying you should write your own library. Quite often you don't want to reinvent the wheel. However, there is a difference between blindly using a package and doing due diligence, making sure the package has enough long-term support. That is your responsibility.
I bought a typewriter from 60s and bought an analog camera and started reading books. To keep myself going crazy and stupid. It's kind of easier to blame AI. FYU I am still blaming AI. I haven't gone through the full process of grieving what is happening to me.
The hard truth I am confronted with is… who do I want to be? How do I want to work? What is my purpose in all this? Should I continue in tech, or should I give up and start a farm somewhere?
Equally, I can see the benefit. I can do tasks and engage in things that would have taken me far too long before. I am able to translate what's in my head into something more tangible. There were many days and weeks I spent scouring obscure documentation or configs for WebPack or K8s specs, trying a million different things to fix something. With my ADHD, I hated every second of it. On the flip side, with AuDHD, I now have a co-worker who never gets tired of my questions, who can vibe with me any time of the day without ever getting frustrated. It has so much power for good.
So honestly, I don't have any answers right now. I feel like, with everything else I'm going through, it'll probably get worse (inversely correlation between mental health and LLM benchmarks) before it gets better for me
For now, I probably try and do all the Leet codes / Euler challenges by hand on paper just so that I can convince myself that I am able to code. I bought a typewriter from 60s and bought an analog camera and started reading books. To keep myself going crazy and stupid.
It's kind of easier to blame AI. FYI, I am still blaming AI. I haven't gone through the full process of grieving what is happening to me.