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voidhorse 5 days ago

Yes. The complete irony in all software engineers enthusiasm for this tech is that, if the boards wishes come true, they are literally helping them eliminate their own jobs. It's like the industrial revolution but worse, because at least the craftsmen weren't also the ones building the factories that would automate them out of work.

Marcuse had a term for this "false consciousness"-when the structure of capitalism ends up making people work against their own interests without realizing it, and that is happening big time in software right now. We will still need programmers for hard, novel problems, but all these lazy programmers using AI to write their crud apps don't seem to realize the writing is on the wall.

csoups14 5 days ago | parent [-]

Or they realize it and they're trying to squeeze the last bit of juice available to them before the party stops. It's not exactly a suboptimal decision to work towards your own job's demise if it's the best paying work available to you and you want to save up as much as possible before any possible disruption. If you quit, someone else steps into the breach and the outcome is all the same. There's very few people actually steering the ship who have any semblance of control; the rest of us are just along for the ride and hoping we don't go down with the ship.

ares623 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah I get that. I myself am part of a team at work building an AI/LLM-based feature.

I always dreaded this would come but it was inevitable.

I can’t outright quit, no thanks in part to the AI hype that stopped valuing headcount as a signal to company growth. If that isn’t ironic I don’t know what is.

Given the situation I am in, I just keep my head down and do the work. I vent and whinge and moan whenever I can, it’s the least I can do. I refuse to cheer it on at work. At the very least I can look my kids in the eye when they are old enough to ask me what the fuck happened and tell them I did not cheer it on.