Look, people are going to pile on and talk about how much they enjoy coding now. Those people have processed this change differently or sooner or later than you have.

This is ok. You will process the change, and you'll come out stronger for having done so. It takes time to decide what you want to do in the world, and even more time to decide how to react to the world changing and moving away from your planned path. And it takes even more time to actually see if the world is moving in a way incompatible with your plans.

It will be tempting to cycle into negative predictions and negative self-talk. This will not help, and will not be productive.

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 struggle with the nature of work every day, and have for months. It has caused me to re-evaluate what I work on, why I do it, how I structure my finances, where my kids go to school, literally everything. Still the ship turns, as it must.

Reach out if you want to chat.

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