I've wasted a lot of time and energy on stuff that doesn't matter, so I can hardly judge anyone else on what they focus on, but man does it feel bad to have community leaders actively focus on building out tooling that is anti-worker. I think the only way I'd feel more conflicted is if Fly.io started building weapons systems for the military. I guess that wouldn't be shocking considering some of their lead's beliefs.

It's safe to say that if either Chris or I believed this to be anti worker, we wouldn't be working on it. He's spent the last 10+ years working on Phoenix specifically to improve the lives of the people doing the work.

My experience with software development is maybe different than yours. There's a massive amount of not-yet-built software that can improve peoples' lives, even in teeny tiny ways. Like 99.999% of what should exist, doesn't.

Building things faster with LLMs makes me more capable. It (so far) has not taken work away from the people I work with. It has made them more capable. We can all build better tools, and faster than we did 12 months ago.

Automation is disruptive to peoples' lives. I get that. It decreases the value of some hard earned skills. Developer automation, in my life at least, has also increased the value of other peoples' skills. I don't believe it's anti worker to build more tools for builders.

You can think of it as just automating the boring tedious stuff so us humans can focus on the harder problems like strategy, direction, design, GTM, etc.

The days are numbered where humans are sitting typing out code themselves.

It's akin to the numbered days of type writer secretaries of the 20th century.

Most tech isn't "Anti worker". What determines pro/anti worker are laws and government policies that reciprocate with the cultural norms we adopt. At the moment, money in U.S. politics is the most anti-worker phenomena I can think of. The ultra wealthy have a monopoly on the incentives that create policy and how our lives are ordered. The only power working people seem to have is the ability to impose consequences via rogue guerilla acts of protest and violence (Luigi Mangion) . Hopefully, AI is a Frankenstein monster the public learns to wield to facilitate more of these "consequences" and upend the monopoly the super wealthy have on policy incentives and change the way politics is funded for good. It's a new world and a Hawaiian or New Zealand doomsday bunker isn't going make a difference.

The same logic that would lead one to believe that AI is anti-worker should also lead one to believe that software as a whole is anti-worker.

Do you believe making things easier and more accessible is bad for workers? I don't think it inherently is or isn't, it just depends on who benefits from the increased efficiency. I think that's more of a problem with your economic system, or wealth distribution.

Overall I think we would all be happier if efficient machines take away the drudgery of our daily work and allow us to focus on things that really matter to us. . . as long as our basic needs are met.