sloob

I work at a startup and often deal with every part of the stack--programming, deployment, db, cloud environment, networking blah blah. AI agents have just gotten superhuman at computer use. I will never be able to use AWS CLI as well as claude does. I can spend time poking around in AWS, manually reading logs, looking at routing tables, cross checking with data in db, whatever, or I can give claude readonly access to all of that stuff and it will solve the issue literally 10x faster than I could, write a detailed report I can pass on to whoever, etc. Is it sometimes BSing? yes, but it just keeps getting better.

All that said, skill atrophy is real. Thinking about getting back on the interview circuit is p scary because of it. I dunno wtf is gonna happen.

Y'all should checkout Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom. It's about exactly this conundrum. He's fairly rosy though about our capacity to find meaningful human interaction and activity in a "solved" world. Though some things we do for purely instrumental reasons might pass away, there's still opportunity to engage in what he calls "autotelic" activity, things we do for themselves. Like playing games, jockeying for hierarchy, sensory experience, ritual, crafts, etc. His other book, Superintelligence, is also pretty interesting--looking more at dark AI scenarios, paperclip maximizers etc.

I agree. Though some software pain used to be more intense (blue screen of death, etc), our lives have become more deeply enmeshed into software, so we feel the friction more. I think we also expect a lot more from software in our daily lives than we did 20 years ago.

As a professional but not amazing CRUD endpoint programmer, AI has sucked some joy out work. The feeling of understanding every line of code, the feeling of knowing when an error pops up where, exactly, the problem might lie, the feeling of tinkering down in the weeds--AI has diminished these feelings, which originally, I think, emanated from ownership. But these are small complaints compared to your average job: programming as a career still provides solid money, great flexibility, and some degree of autonomy. How long will I be a viable asset to an engineering team? How long will teams matter even? I don't know. For now, I'm just holding on.

For hobby programming, AI has empowered me to create things I otherwise would not have been able to create. The slop is not super maintainable but sometimes smoking a joint and getting claude to write three.js is an evening well spent, imo.

Overall, it's a brave new world. Hopefully the doomers are just playing DnD.

Worked for years for personal injury lawyers as an assistant/clerk. Work as a programmer now, tho. I agree that a LLM cannot do a lawyer's job on its own. Especially a trial lawyer's - which involves appearance and performance in a court room. But LLMs are having a massive impact on anything involving digestion of documents (medical records, pleadings, briefs, blah blah) and creation of documents (demand letters, pleadings, correspondence, etc etc) - like 90% of the work. What's happening is very similar to software engineering - the ladder is getting pulled up for entry level and paralegal work.