>This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.

I think I know people in both camps who feel both ways. I'd say it's all just noise at this point. What's clear is some people like it (for now) and some people don't (and probably won't ever). I've gone from liking it to not over the course of the last year. I used to love programming/the craft, and then got burnt out of it, so I loved it because it made building things easier again after I stopped caring about that, and then it made work hellish when everyone basically stopped caring about the craft at all.

I feel for everyone in this situation. I don't think anyone is wrong to mourn the undeniably massive shift happening to something that has been such a big part of our lives, and I don't think anyone is wrong to be excited. I say this as someone who has worked in ML for coming up on 10 years now and is more towards the latter camp, where I love working with agents, and still spend plenty of time writing code by hand and studying. I don't think it's fair to pretend people are being unreasonable or are just "missing the big picture" for being unhappy.

But I also have found that where you work and what AI usage is like in your company is a pretty big deciding factor. Your comment, which I agree with, made me think about this. I consult a decent amount, and I've worked with companies where the engineering culture has adopted AI in a way I describe as "ugly." I should find a better word. But what I mean is that it's sort of like the attitude is "okay, now we can ship more tickets, so everyone take on 8x the workload". And they do a lot of "best practice" kind of stuff around using coding agents--every new anthropic article gets posted to slack, and there's always a new CI process for using agents--but they're fundamentally just trying to do the same work as before but kinda sorta faster. It's a weirdly miserable experience.

On the other hand, I've worked with companies where the engineering culture almost feels exuberant. I think a consistent difference is that in these companies, it feels like the engineers now have permission to try wildly ambitious things. It's not always optimally productive in the sense that more things get thrown away or end up just not really working out, but overall they move significantly faster and do more interesting work. Commonly, it's things they wanted to do before, but simply weren't realistic with their constraints around capacity. Or it's an idea like "this part of the codebase has always been a performance nightmare, but it's also a beast to untangle. I wonder if I could setup an autoresearch loop and let it run all day, even just to harvest some ideas?"

But yeah, when everyone sort of gives up and/or are forced to move an ungodly number of smaller tickets, it is a miserable time.