I think this is basically the right attitude. The focus should be on what you really value intrinsically, and what changes you want to see in the world. Those determine the goals you set, which determine how you choose what to learn, what to work on, and what tools to use. The metaphor of a "career path" was always questionable, but even more so now. The most important skills are dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity and being able to adapt to new circumstances.

Really wonderful comment. Thanks for sharing. I've noticed myself spiraling into doom-and-gloom scenarios about the future of this job (and therefore my future), and I've found it really unhelpful and really unproductive, in the sense that it sort of narrows my mind into a tunnel vision of decreasing possibilities.

This is wisdom thanx.

I too have lost something I loved, I gained it after years of relentlessly focusing on maximizing what I loved and minimizing what cost me energy. And now the world flips on me.

The good news? I got pretty good at consciously finding the energy givers and drainers and optimizing for the givers, so I'll just keep doing that. I'll either start enjoying micro-managing LLMs, or find something else entirely. Or find that the LLMs need less and less micromanaging, or start enjoying whatever they need next year. (Point an army of agents in a direction?)

I came from the molecular biolab with Linux as a hobby, then when to software dev and infra. What's next ? Idk, I still love biology, keeping eyes and ears open...

You sound like you're processing this well. I think I'm in the group of people you're talking about who aren't processing it well. What kind of conclusions have you come to regarding that list (what you work on and how, finances, kids, etc.)?

The job description fundamentally changed to the point where we're expected to do something very different.

No amount of processing will move someone from ordering a steak to just enjoying their given peanut butter sandwich instead. They ordered the steak, and now the restaurant is telling us all too bad there's no steak anymore - eat your damn sandwich.

Thank you for a great, empathetic comment.

A non-zero amount of people are preparing (or have already) to leave the industry entirely.

Even if one were to continue doing everything by hand, it will still be harder compared to others who aren't. As in, companies will come to expect more/faster work than you are capable of, so it still affects us old farts that don't want to change.

We'll find something else, sure, or just retire... but not everyone is/was ready to.

I'm not sad on a personal level per se, I can still be positive and look to the future, but I lament what we increasingly no longer have.

Very well written, thank you.

> You, ryandvm, built a career around something you love, and that is amazing. You can choose to do it again, to find something you love, to be stalwart about how you work and who you work with, or any number of other options. The thing that nobody can change is your agency.

I've always taken the view that it was luck - lucky that my interests aligned with the market, lucky the market put value in what I am interested in doing, and lucky that I was given the chance.

I was never in it for the money, I was always in it for the enjoyment, and I will remain in it for the same thing.

The market for my knowledge and skills might come and go, there might have been a brief moment in history when someone like me could make a living off these skills, but like so many other creative careers that time was always going to be fleeting

With LLM and current economic situation my job is doing 5 things at once and after 7:30h my brain is just in panic mode. On remote this isn't a huge issue but in the office (which I'm obligated to be twice a week) I just don't know what to do so I eat 3 meal 5min each pretending this is normal.

Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.

Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.

Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.

So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible

invent new downtime. that's what i'm doing by writing this comment.

Music is an excellent downtime.

Part of the problem is that senior management in many organizations is so damn bad at, well, organizing the organization. Both the people and the software architecture. There really is something to an approach like everyone credits to Amazon: small team with a discrete product and proper architectural boundaries, communicating to other applications in known predictable ways with a proper process on both ends for making changes.

When you do that, a team can just go. Instead, in many places there's all this bullshit about "Application X is built by Team A, but Team B and C will do the QA." Or "Team D is in charge of Applications Y, Z, and Q, so they can't get to your feature request for Q this PI, because they've got high-priority work for Y and Z." So now you've self-blocked all work on Q just by screwing up your org chart. And we haven't talked about the fact that Team A is in the US, Team B is in Europe, and Teams C and D are in India, so now let's add time zone nonsense to all of the above stupidity.

You don't need as many of those ancillary roles if people involved actually understand Lean and how to run an SDLC, but in my experience, there are too many devs who don't care about anything other than slinging code and too many managers more interested in expanding their own rice bowls and looking important than in actually streamlining how stuff makes it to prod. And then you need a pile of PMs or Scrum Masters to sort out the mess.

> How strange.

People enjoy different things. Its not strange. Treating it as strange is kinda insulting, so I'd recommend that you rethink how you phrase this.

> At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks

Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.

> "I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks, and AI is a "solution" to that."

That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.

But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.

I've always enjoyed hacking on random projects and AI does that really well. Every crazy idea I've ever had can be iterated on, and takes way less time now. Sure it's awesome that I don't have to spend hours throwing together a bunch of python and bash scripts, but it just happens instantly now. That's why I actually like Copilot autocompletion for side projects, because I can build something and still save a massive amount of time tinkering with limited blockers. I wish there was a better middle ground between "one shot this" and writing everything yourself.

> I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks

> AI is a "solution" to that

Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?

i'm the same way, and my personal projects are being created in a similar way.

i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.

it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.

for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.

> Now, my software engineering is for my own company, maybe that makes a difference.

That is 100% the difference. Most people working as employees aren't passionate about the company as an entity. They won't love your baby like you do. What they did love was taking your baby for walks; now they're left with just changing dirty diapers.

Good to hear opinion like yours, I am of the same opinion. I use AI in the same way as you describe.

Now I understand the meaning of the famous opening sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

You probably micromanage the LLMs architectural choices. Thats actually a bad idea, you will probably get better results if you let the LLM decide the architecture and just tweak it where its assumptions are wrong. It has much more context than you in its codebase anyway. Then you won’t feel like a general more, but you’ll be much more productive :)

It's funny how differently people see things. I find reading/reviewing LLM generated code to be much more difficult and tedious that writing it myself.

I agree it’s very mixed, it strongly depends on what you are developing, how big and established your codebase is, how opinionated you are about simple vs overdone, how many subtle and nonlocal interactions your codebase has, etc. Plus the more experienced you are the more you are likely to reject the AI solution as not well considered, whereas to someone new may think it looks plausible and confident.

Yes, they're very good at writing code now. The problem is that we (or at least I am) drowning in code that runs and does that resembles the problem you asked it to solve, but that something is frequently semantically incorrect.

Something has to give; the constant onslaught of slop and workflows changing every few months just isn't sustainable. Either we slow the fuck down and figure out what we're even doing here, or the AI improves so much that we're all out of a job.

They're great and you don't have to review everything.

From what you're always commenting, I could believe that you were exclusively using Haiku 4.5, which would explain how the tool produces only garbage while the rest of the world pretends AI was great.

Just out of curiosity, do you use like Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, and you still find the results inadequate?

I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.

Well, I can't speak for the person above, but in my case typing out the code is part of solving the problem. Plenty of times I've thought I had a great idea in my head, and then in the process of writing it out found better understanding and an even better approach. Some of that can still be emulated with LLMs -- you can read the output and have it tweak things where you find oddities, but its still not really the same, and I miss having that process of discovery and improvement.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never really clicked with a "plan everything upfront, and then all that's left is writing the code" process

I've also never really experienced that professionally. I started as a professional programmer in 2012 and I've always been pushed to do some form of "agile" where you figure stuff out while you work because building detailed specs upfront is too costly and time consuming

So now I'm being told it's fine to pivot to these AI tools and it's awesome, you just plan upfront and execute. But I genuinely don't think I have those skills. My workflow has always been "have a rough idea where we're going and fill in the blanks as we go"

So now I'm trying to adjust to this new work, planning upfront with more detail and I'm struggling.

Coding is how I used to work through problems. I was really good at it. Now I feel like a fraud. Just a hacker, not a software engineer. I don't know how to get to where I need to be, and I'm really unsure I even have it in me to learn and entirely new way of being

I went from feeling on top of my life, my career on a great trajectory, and really confident I could build anything that anyone needed, to feeling completely worthless

And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.

If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.