sodafountan

Yes.

AI (in its current state) is phenomenal for research on just about any topic; you can dive deep and cross-reference the material more easily than ever.

AI (in its current state) is not so good at actually doing things; we're a long ways off from simply speaking software into existence.

As hard as it is to admit, the used market hurts developers the most. If I buy a game and then resell it to a friend for more money than what the game store would offer, but less than what they'd pay at retail. The actual developer of the game sees no profit. It's a win-win for the gamers, not so much for the developers.

Digital assets don't degrade like an appliance or a used car might, so the used market really cuts into the profits of game companies.

I don't believe the solution to this is to go all digital and cut off access to physical media entirely. What we need are stronger digital economies that can grow organically with a community.

Digital media needs the backing of cryptocurrency to remain viable. We need digital assets and economies that either grow or shrink in value based on demand. Rather than fake digital currencies that have no value outside of the world they're used in, we need real cryptocurrencies that are traded on open markets like stocks to bolster the digital economy and make the economics of building fun, lasting games a reality.

I'm tired of spending money on digital points for games that have no real value. Everything should be a cryptocurrency at this point.

didn't ask

I know of two women under the age of 30 who got cancer, they were spouses/girlfriends of friends of mine. I didn't know them well personally, and only met them a handful of times at outings.

Because they weren't married yet I'm sure it's just compounding their financial struggles.

I was shocked when I heard they had cancer, I almost didn't believe it. Under 30 is such a young age to be diagnosed.

I agree that being a programmer doesn't make you an expert at everything, but OP brought up a good point. Tech is a lot more accessible than other fields. It would be nice if I could pivot into other fields as easily as someone could pivot into tech.

Aside from going to college for many years, there's really no other way to break into the medical field. College is expensive and quite daunting to many (myself included), which is a shame because I'd really like to contribute more to humanity than moving pixels around on a screen and helping businesses with their data problems.

Ah, this helped me wrap my head around what actually makes an MCP special.

I just want you to know that you're not alone.

I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.

I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.

They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.

I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.

Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.

I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.

Here's wishing you the best for the future.

That's a rare niche; the vast majority of software makes no money whatsoever.

What type of software do you produce?

Are the DJs live?

I was wondering about this myself, but given everything I know about AI. Won't the vocabulary slowly and subtly change as common people try to develop software, not knowing the jargon? Won't the AI systems learn from the prompts and adjust their understanding of what's trying to be accomplished?

Good News! I learned something today.

I'm unfamiliar with harness engineering. Is there any good documentation about the subject you could point me to?

Good News! The horse and the car can coexist

Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding.

If I were to use it against a legacy, rather poorly written codebase, where the code may be hard to understand without some in-depth analysis. I could certainly ask an AI agent to read the code (How does application X do Y, for example), but I wouldn't have it start hammering out features or have it do any type of refactoring. That would cause far too many commits and confusion amongst the development team, leading to even more slop than whatever we'd already be dealing with.

Just leaving this comment here so I can come back to your comment. I've been getting a bit discouraged by AI lately, but this sums up my experience with it well enough.