Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job?

Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

It's likely the people that were not good developers that suddenly got accelerated "to the top" that seem the most for it. All of the good devs I know have been a bit more cautious on the uptake.

Because we've been automating large parts of our former jobs for decades. Otherwise we'd all be trying to build things in the least efficient way possible to maximize how long the job takes, which IMO isn't a great idea.

Humans have been minimizing how much work is needed to get a certain level of output for as long as we can track. It's civilization. Should we go back to farming by hand with hoes, to maximize labor used? Go back to streetlights that are individually lit? The society that falls behind on automation becomes poorer, and eventually just dies, as even the people born there tend to choose to leave to higher productivity places. It happened to eastern europe, it happens to the Amish. To any poor society which gets emigration. Doing more with less has always been exciting.

Because usually the people who lose their jobs are people who do not adapt to the market.

Right now it's not clear in which direction everything is involving and that's why people experiment with handing all their data to random agents, figuring out how to store and access context, re-use prompts and other attempts to harness this tech. Most of these will maybe be useless in a year as they might be deeply integrated into the next wave of models but staying on top of the development has always been part of the fun of working in this field.

Some people are playing the global optimization game; a world where anyone can have any (production grade) software they want.

I don't understand this thinking as a computer programmer. My whole life has been about getting a computer to do work so humans don't have to anymore. Every single piece of software written is supposed to take away work from someone.

Do you feel this way about every automation you create? I do know some old school sys admins who felt this way about a lot of infrastructure automation advancements, and didn't like that we were creating scripts and systems to do the work that used to be done by hand. My team created an automated patching system at a job that would automatically run patching across our 30,000 servers, taking systems in and out of production autonomously, allowing the entire process to be hands free. We used to have a team whose full time job was running that process manually. Did we take their jobs by automating it?

Sure, in a sense. But there was other work that needed to be done, and now they could do it.

The whole reason I like programming and computers and technology is precisely because it does things for us so we don't have to do it. My utopia is robots doing all the hard work so humans can do whatever we want. AI is bringing us one step closer to that, and I would rather focus on trying to figure out how we can make sure the whole world can benefit from robots taking our jobs (and not just the rich owners), rather than focus on trying to make sure we leave enough work for humans to stay busy doing shit they don't actually want to do.

people are now being encouraged to use ai notetaking features under the guise of productivity.

a worker is just the sum total of all work related context. to collate, verify and organize this context is just asking to be replaced.

Month 30 of software engineers not existing in 6 months