You can't change the world, you can change yourself. Many people don't like change. So, people get frustrated when the world inevitably changes and they fail to adapt. It's called getting older. Happens to us all.

I'm not immune to that and I catch myself sometimes being more reluctant to adapt. I'm well aware and I actively try to force myself to adapt. Because the alternative is becoming stuck in my ways and increasingly less relevant. There are a lot of much younger people around me that still have most of their careers ahead of them. They can try to whine about AI all they want for the next four decades or so but I don't think it will help them. Or they can try to deal with the fact that these tools are here now and that they need to learn to adapt to them whether they like it or not. And we are probably going to see quite some progress on the tool front. It's only been 3 years since ChatGPT had its public launch.

To address the core issue here. You can use AI or let AI use you. The difference here is about who is in control and who is setting the goals. The traditional software development team is essentially managers prompting programmers to do stuff. And now we have programmers prompting AIs to do that stuff. If you are just a middle man relaying prompts from managers to the AI, you are not adding a lot of value. That's frustrating. It should be because it means apparently you are very replaceable.

But you can turn that around. What makes that manager the best person to be prompting you? What's stopping them from skipping that entirely? Because that's your added value. Whatever you are good at and they are not is what you should be doing most of your time. The AI tools are just a means to an end to free up more time for whatever that is. Adapting means figuring that out for yourself and figuring out things that you enjoy doing that are still valuable to do.

There's plenty of work to be done. And AI tools won't lift a finger to do it until somebody starts telling them what needs doing. I see a lot of work around me that isn't getting done. A lot of people are blind to those opportunities. Hint: most of that stuff still looks like hard work. If some jerk can one shot prompt it, it isn't all that valuable and not worth your time.

Hard work usually involves thinking hard, skilling up, and figuring things out. The type of stuff the author is complaining he misses doing.